Developing a Random Forest Algorithm for MODIS Global Burned Area Classification
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper aims to develop a global burned area (BA) algorithm for MODIS BRDF-corrected images based on the Random Forest (RF) classifier. Two RF models were generated, including: (1) all MODIS reflective bands; and (2) only the red (R) and near infrared (NIR) bands. Active fire information, vegetation indices and auxiliary variables were taken into account as well. Both RF models were trained using a statistically designed sample of 130 reference sites, which took into account the global diversity of fire conditions. For each site, fire perimeters were obtained from multitemporal pairs of Landsat TM/ETM+ images acquired in 2008. Those fire perimeters were used to extract burned and unburned areas to train the RF models. Using the standard MD43A4 resolution (500 × 500 m), the training dataset included 48,365 burned pixels and 6,293,205 unburned pixels. Different combinations of number of trees and number of parameters were tested. The final RF models included 600 trees and 5 attributes. The RF full model (considering all bands) provided a balanced accuracy of 0.94, while the RF RNIR model had 0.93. As a first assessment of these RF models, they were used to classify daily MCD43A4 images in three test sites for three consecutive years (2006–2008). The selected sites included different ecosystems: Australia (Tropical), Boreal (Canada) and Temperate (California), and extended coverage (totaling more than 2,500,000 km2). Results from both RF models for those sites were compared with national fire perimeters, as well as with two existing BA MODIS products; the MCD45 and MCD64. Considering all three years and three sites, commission error for the RF Full model was 0.16, with an omission error of 0.23. For the RF RNIR model, these errors were 0.19 and 0.21, respectively. The existing MODIS BA products had lower commission errors, but higher omission errors (0.09 and 0.33 for the MCD45 and 0.10 and 0.29 for the MCD64) than those obtained with the RF models, and therefore they showed less balanced accuracies. The RF models developed here should be applicable to other biomes and years, as they were trained with a global set of reference BA sites.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it