Evaluating the quality of remote sensing products for agricultural index insurance.

Agricultural index insurance contracts increasingly use remote sensing data to estimate losses and determine indemnity payouts. Index insurance contracts inevitably make errors, failing to detect losses that occur and issuing payments when no losses occur. The quality of these contracts and the indices on which they are based, need to be evaluated to assess their fitness as insurance, and to provide a guide to choosing the index that best protects the insured. In the remote sensing literature, indices are often evaluated with generic model evaluation statistics such as R2 or Root Mean Square Error that do not directly consider the effect of errors on the quality of the insurance contract. Economic analysis suggests using measures that capture the impact of insurance on the expected economic well-being of the insured. To bridge the gap between the remote sensing and economic perspectives, we adopt a standard economic measure of expected well-being and transform it into a Relative Insurance Benefit (RIB) metric. RIB expresses the welfare benefits derived from an index insurance contract relative to a hypothetical contract that perfectly measures losses. RIB takes on its maximal value of one when the index contract offers the same economic benefits as the perfect contract. When it achieves none of the benefits of insurance it takes on a value of zero, and becomes negative if the contract leaves the insured worse off than having no insurance. Part of our contribution is to decompose this economic well-being measure into an asymmetric loss function. We also argue that the expected well-being measure we use has advantages over other economic measures for the normative purpose of insurance quality ascertainment. Finally, we illustrate the use of the RIB measure with a case study of potential livestock insurance contracts in Northern Kenya. We compared 24 indices that were made with 4 different statistical models and 3 remote sensing data sources. RIB for these indices ranged from 0.09 to 0.5, and R2 ranged from 0.2 to 0.51. While RIB and R2 were correlated, the model with the highest RIB did not have the highest R2. Our findings suggest that, when designing and evaluating an index insurance program, it is useful to separately consider the quality of a remote sensing-based index with a metric like the RIB instead of a generic goodness-of-fit metric.

Arabica coffee leaf images dataset for coffee leaf disease detection and classification.

This article introduces Arabica coffee leaf datasets known as JMuBEN and JMuBEN2. Image acquisition was done in Mutira coffee plantation in Kirinyaga county-Kenya under real-world conditions using a digital camera and with the help of a pathologist. JMuBEN dataset contains three compressed folders with images inside. The first file contains 7682 images of Cerscospora, the second contains 8337 images of rust and the last one contains 6572 images of Phoma. JMuBEN2 contains two compressed files where the first file contains 16,979 images of Miner while the other contains 18,985 images of healthy leaves. In total, the dataset contains 58,555 leaf images spread across five classes (Phoma, Cescospora, Rust, Healthy, Miner,) with annotations regarding the state of the leaves and the disease names. The Arabica datasets contain images that facilitates training and validation during the utilization of deep learning algorithms for coffee plant leaf disease recognition and classification. The dataset is publicly and freely available at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/tgv3zb82nd/1 and https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/t2r6rszp5c/1 respectively.