On the Importance of Feature Representation for Flood Mapping using Classical Machine Learning Approaches

Climate change has increased the severity and frequency of weather disasters all around the world. Flood inundation mapping based on earth observation data can help in this context, by providing cheap and accurate maps depicting the area affected by a flood event to emergency-relief units in near-real-time. Building upon the recent development of the Sen1Floods11 dataset, which provides a limited amount of hand-labeled high-quality training data, this paper evaluates the potential of five traditional machine learning approaches such as gradient boosted decision trees, support vector machines or quadratic discriminant analysis. By performing a grid-search-based hyperparameter optimization on 23 feature spaces we can show that all considered classifiers are capable of outperforming the current state-of-the-art neural network-based approaches in terms of total IoU on their best-performing feature spaces. With total and mean IoU values of 0.8751 and 0.7031 compared to 0.70 and 0.5873 as the previous best-reported results, we show that a simple gradient boosting classifier can significantly improve over deep neural network based approaches, despite using less training data. Furthermore, an analysis of the regional distribution of the Sen1Floods11 dataset reveals a problem of spatial imbalance. We show that traditional machine learning models can learn this bias and argue that modified metric evaluations are required to counter artifacts due to spatial imbalance. Lastly, a qualitative analysis shows that this pixel-wise classifier provides highly-precise surface water classifications indicating that a good choice of a feature space and pixel-wise classification can generate high-quality flood maps using optical and SAR data. We make our code publicly available at: https://github.com/DFKI-Earth-And-Space-Applications/Flood_Mapping_Feature_Space_Importance

Paradigm Shift Through the Integration of Physical Methodology and Data Science

Data science methodologies, which have undergone significant developments recently, provide flexible representational performance and fast computational means to address the challenges faced by traditional scientific methodologies while revealing unprecedented challenges such as the interpretability of computations and the demand for extrapolative predictions on the amount of data. Methods that integrate traditional physical and data science methodologies are new methods of mathematical analysis that complement both methodologies and are being studied in various scientific fields. This paper highlights the significance and importance of such integrated methods from the viewpoint of scientific theory. Additionally, a comprehensive survey of specific methods and applications are conducted, and the current state of the art in relevant research fields are summarized.

Hybrid Scheme of Kinematic Analysis and Lagrangian Koopman Operator Analysis for Short-term Precipitation Forecasting

With the accumulation of meteorological big data, data-driven models for short-term precipitation forecasting have shown increasing promise. We focus on Koopman operator analysis, which is a data-driven scheme to discover governing laws in observed data. We propose a method to apply this scheme to phenomena accompanying advection currents such as precipitation. The proposed method decomposes time evolutions of the phenomena between advection currents under a velocity field and changes in physical quantities under Lagrangian coordinates. The advection currents are estimated by kinematic analysis, and the changes in physical quantities are estimated by Koopman operator analysis. The proposed method is applied to actual precipitation distribution data, and the results show that the development and decay of precipitation are properly captured relative to conventional methods and that stable predictions over long periods are possible.