A sensitivity analysis of the continent-wise models
showed that RAIN, LWP and RAD for the day of disease
severity assessment and RAIN on the previous day are the
four most important weather attributes in the Australian
ANN model. RAIN and RAD on the day of severity
assessment and RAIN and LWP on the previous day were
also the four most significant input attributes in the South
American ANN model, although RAIN and RAD were
more important and LWP was less important in the South
American than in the Australian model (Table 3). Similarly,
RAIN, RAD and LWP on the day of severity assessment
and/or the previous day were the most important
weather attributes in each of the six cross-continent models,
and RAIN during the day and/or the previous day was
the single most important of all attributes in all models
except the one trained on data that excluded Planaltina,
where another moisture-related variable, LWP on the previous
day, was more important than RAIN (Table 3).