• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.763-776
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• 2020

Onions show severe volatility in production and price because crop conditions highly depend on the weather. The government has designated onions as a sensitive agricultural product, and prepared various measures to stabilize the supply and demand. First of all, preemptive and reliable information on predicting onion production is essential to implement appropriate and effective measures. This study aims to contribute to improving the accuracy of production forecasting by developing a model to estimate the final weight of onions bulb. For the analysis, multi-level model is used to reflect the hierarchical data characteristics consisting of above-ground growth data in individual units and meteorological data in parcel units. The result shows that as the number of leaf, stem diameter, and plant height in early May increase, the bulb weight increases. The amount of precipitation as well as the number of days beyond a certain temperature inhibiting carbon assimilation have negative effects on bulb weight, However, the daily range of temperature and more precipitation near the harvest season are statistically significant as positive effects. Also, it is confirmed that the fitness and explanatory power of the model is improved by considering the interaction terms between level-1 and level-2 variables.