Yield-graph: multi-stage growth-aware maize yield prediction via graph neural networks.

key messageYield-Graph enables accurate maize yield prediction from incomplete multi-stage phenotypic and environmental data by modeling higher-order environment-trait interactions, with robust applicability across growth stages, regions, and crop species. Accurate yield prediction before maize harvest is crucial for advancing agricultural management and ensuring food security. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on traits from a single growth stage, this study models multiple traits across different developmental stages, all targeting final yield, thereby uncovering their stage-specific contributions and demonstrating the feasibility of early yield prediction. We introduce Yield-Graph, an innovative framework that evaluates phenotypic data at distinct developmental stages for yield prediction. The method employs a bipartite graph structure to impute missing trait values at each stage and leverages a hypergraph attention mechanism to capture high-order sample relationships. Comprehensive benchmark experiments demonstrate that Yield-Graph matches the top-tier predictive accuracy of exhaustively optimized tree models. Moreover, the framework exhibits strong robustness across growth stages, high adaptability to regional variations, and effective generalization across datasets. These findings highlight the potential of graph-enhanced multi-stage modeling for early-stage yield prediction, offering a scalable solution for precision agriculture and intelligent crop management.