Machine-Learning Classification of SAR Remotely-Sensed Sea-Surface Petroleum Signatures—Part 1: Training and Testing Cross Validation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sea-surface petroleum pollution is observed as “oil slicks” (i.e., “oil spills” or “oil seeps”) and can be confused with “look-alike slicks” (i.e., environmental phenomena, such as low-wind speed, upwelling conditions, chlorophyll, etc.) in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) measurements, the most proficient satellite sensor to detect mineral oil on the sea surface. Even though machine learning (ML) has become widely used to classify remotely-sensed petroleum signatures, few papers have been published comparing various ML methods to distinguish spills from look-alikes. Our research fills this gap by comparing and evaluating six traditional techniques: simple (naive Bayes (NB), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), decision trees (DT)) and advanced (random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN)) applied to different combinations of satellite-retrieved attributes. 36 ML algorithms were used to discriminate “ocean-slick signatures” (spills versus look-alikes) with ten-times repeated random subsampling cross validation (70-30 train-test partition). Our results found that the best algorithm (ANN: 90%) was >20% more effective than the least accurate one (DT: ~68%). Our empirical ML observations contribute to both scientific ocean remote-sensing research and to oil and gas industry activities, in that: (i) most techniques were superior when morphological information and Meteorological and Oceanographic (MetOc) parameters were included together, and less accurate when these variables were used separately; (ii) the algorithms with the better performance used more variables (without feature selection), while lower accuracy algorithms were those that used fewer variables (with feature selection); (iii) we created algorithms more effective than those of benchmark-past studies that used linear discriminant analysis (LDA: ~85%) on the same dataset; and (iv) accurate algorithms can assist in finding new offshore fossil fuel discoveries (i.e., misclassification reduction).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".