Unveiling 3D ocean biogeochemical provinces in the North Atlantic: A systematic comparison and validation of clustering methods
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Defining ocean regions and water masses helps to understand marine processes and can serve downstream tasks such as defining marine protected areas. However, such definitions often result from subjective decisions potentially producing misleading, unreproducible outcomes. Here, the aim was to objectively define regions of the North Atlantic through systematic comparison of clustering methods within the Native Emergent Manifold Interrogation (NEMI) framework (Sonnewald, 2023). About 300 million measured salinity, temperature, and oxygen, nitrate, phosphate and silicate concentration values served as input for various clustering methods (k-Means, agglomerative Ward, and Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN)). Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) emphasised (dis-)similarities in the data while reducing dimensionality. Based on systematic validation of clustering methods and their hyperparameters using internal, external and relative validation techniques, results showed that UMAP-DBSCAN best represented the data. Strikingly, internal validation metrics proved systematically unreliable for comparing clustering methods. To address stochastic variability, 100 UMAP-DBSCAN clustering runs were conducted and aggregated following NEMI, yielding a final set of 321 clusters. Reproducibility was evaluated via ensemble overlap (88.81±1.8%) and mean grid cell-wise uncertainty (15.49±20%). Case studies of the Mediterranean Sea, deep Atlantic waters and Labrador Sea showed strong agreement with common water mass definitions. This study revealed a more detailed regionalisation compared to previous concepts such as the Longhurst provinces through systematic clustering method comparison. The applied method is objective, efficient and reproducible and will support future research on biogeochemical differences and changes in oceanic regions. • NEMI enabled objective, reproducible clustering of physics and biogeochemistry • DBSCAN best captured natural associations within North Atlantic data • UMAP embedding strengthened data associations, improving clustering of all methods • Grid-cells were assigned to clusters with a mean uncertainty of about 15% • Good agreement with known subdivisions with potential for novel insights
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 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