Light Gradient Boosting Machine: An efficient soft computing model for estimating daily reference evapotranspiration with local and external meteorological data

Accurate estimation of reference evapotranspiration (ETo) is required in many fields, e.g. irrigation scheduling design, agricultural water management, crop growth modeling and drought assessment. Nevertheless, reliable estimation of ETo is difficult when lack of complete or long-term meteorological data at the target station. This study evaluated the efficiency of a new tree-based soft computing model, Light Gradient Boosting Machine...