scholarly journals Using satellite imagery to understand and promote sustainable development

Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 371 (6535) ◽  
pp. eabe8628
Author(s):  
Marshall Burke ◽  
Anne Driscoll ◽  
David B. Lobell ◽  
Stefano Ermon

Accurate and comprehensive measurements of a range of sustainable development outcomes are fundamental inputs into both research and policy. We synthesize the growing literature that uses satellite imagery to understand these outcomes, with a focus on approaches that combine imagery with machine learning. We quantify the paucity of ground data on key human-related outcomes and the growing abundance and improving resolution (spatial, temporal, and spectral) of satellite imagery. We then review recent machine learning approaches to model-building in the context of scarce and noisy training data, highlighting how this noise often leads to incorrect assessment of model performance. We quantify recent model performance across multiple sustainable development domains, discuss research and policy applications, explore constraints to future progress, and highlight research directions for the field.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linglin Zeng ◽  
Shun Hu ◽  
Daxiang Xiang ◽  
Xiang Zhang ◽  
Deren Li ◽  
...  

Soil moisture mapping at a regional scale is commonplace since these data are required in many applications, such as hydrological and agricultural analyses. The use of remotely sensed data for the estimation of deep soil moisture at a regional scale has received far less emphasis. The objective of this study was to map the 500-m, 8-day average and daily soil moisture at different soil depths in Oklahoma from remotely sensed and ground-measured data using the random forest (RF) method, which is one of the machine-learning approaches. In order to investigate the estimation accuracy of the RF method at both a spatial and a temporal scale, two independent soil moisture estimation experiments were conducted using data from 2010 to 2014: a year-to-year experiment (with a root mean square error (RMSE) ranging from 0.038 to 0.050 m3/m3) and a station-to-station experiment (with an RMSE ranging from 0.044 to 0.057 m3/m3). Then, the data requirements, importance factors, and spatial and temporal variations in estimation accuracy were discussed based on the results using the training data selected by iterated random sampling. The highly accurate estimations of both the surface and the deep soil moisture for the study area reveal the potential of RF methods when mapping soil moisture at a regional scale, especially when considering the high heterogeneity of land-cover types and topography in the study area.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. s521-s522
Author(s):  
Debarka Sengupta ◽  
Vaibhav Singh ◽  
Seema Singh ◽  
Dinesh Tewari ◽  
Mudit Kapoor ◽  
...  

Background: The rising trend of antibiotic resistance imposes a heavy burden on healthcare both clinically and economically (US$55 billion), with 23,000 estimated annual deaths in the United States as well as increased length of stay and morbidity. Machine-learning–based methods have, of late, been used for leveraging patient’s clinical history and demographic information to predict antimicrobial resistance. We developed a machine-learning model ensemble that maximizes the accuracy of such a drug-sensitivity versus resistivity classification system compared to the existing best-practice methods. Methods: We first performed a comprehensive analysis of the association between infecting bacterial species and patient factors, including patient demographics, comorbidities, and certain healthcare-specific features. We leveraged the predictable nature of these complex associations to infer patient-specific antibiotic sensitivities. Various base-learners, including k-NN (k-nearest neighbors) and gradient boosting machine (GBM), were used to train an ensemble model for confident prediction of antimicrobial susceptibilities. Base learner selection and model performance evaluation was performed carefully using a variety of standard metrics, namely accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and Cohen κ. Results: For validating the performance on MIMIC-III database harboring deidentified clinical data of 53,423 distinct patient admissions between 2001 and 2012, in the intensive care units (ICUs) of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. From ~11,000 positive cultures, we used 4 major specimen types namely urine, sputum, blood, and pus swab for evaluation of the model performance. Figure 1 shows the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves obtained for bloodstream infection cases upon model building and prediction on 70:30 split of the data. We received area under the curve (AUC) values of 0.88, 0.92, 0.92, and 0.94 for urine, sputum, blood, and pus swab samples, respectively. Figure 2 shows the comparative performance of our proposed method as well as some off-the-shelf classification algorithms. Conclusions: Highly accurate, patient-specific predictive antibiogram (PSPA) data can aid clinicians significantly in antibiotic recommendation in ICU, thereby accelerating patient recovery and curbing antimicrobial resistance.Funding: This study was supported by Circle of Life Healthcare Pvt. Ltd.Disclosures: None


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 648
Author(s):  
Guie Li ◽  
Zhongliang Cai ◽  
Yun Qian ◽  
Fei Chen

Enriching Asian perspectives on the rapid identification of urban poverty and its implications for housing inequality, this paper contributes empirical evidence about the utility of image features derived from high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning approaches for identifying urban poverty in China at the community level. For the case of the Jiangxia District and Huangpi District of Wuhan, image features, including perimeter, line segment detector (LSD), Hough transform, gray-level cooccurrence matrix (GLCM), histogram of oriented gradients (HoG), and local binary patterns (LBP), are calculated, and four machine learning approaches and 25 variables are applied to identify urban poverty and relatively important variables. The results show that image features and machine learning approaches can be used to identify urban poverty with the best model performance with a coefficient of determination, R2, of 0.5341 and 0.5324 for Jiangxia and Huangpi, respectively, although some differences exist among the approaches and study areas. The importance of each variable differs for each approach and study area; however, the relatively important variables are similar. In particular, four variables achieved relatively satisfactory prediction results for all models and presented obvious differences in varying communities with different poverty levels. Housing inequality within low-income neighborhoods, which is a response to gaps in wealth, income, and housing affordability among social groups, is an important manifestation of urban poverty. Policy makers can implement these findings to rapidly identify urban poverty, and the findings have potential applications for addressing housing inequality and proving the rationality of urban planning for building a sustainable society.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianna Pagán ◽  
Adekunle Ajayi ◽  
Mamadou Krouma ◽  
Jyotsna Budideti ◽  
Omar Tafsi

<p>The value of satellite imagery to monitor crop health in near-real time continues to exponentially grow as more missions are launched making data available at higher spatial and temporal scales. Yet cloud cover remains an issue for utilizing vegetation indexes (VIs) solely based on optic imagery, especially in certain regions and climates. Previous research has proven the ability to reconstruct VIs like the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Leaf Area Index (LAI) by leveraging synthetic aperture radar (SAR) datasets, which are not inhibited by cloud cover. Publicly available data from SAR missions like Sentinel-1 at relatively decent spatial resolutions present the opportunity for more affordable options for agriculture users to integrate satellite imagery in their day to day operations. Previous research has successfully reconstructed optic VIs (i.e. from Sentinel-2) with SAR data (i.e. from Sentinel-1) leveraging various machine learning approaches for a limited number of crop types. However, these efforts normally train on individual pixels rather than leveraging information at a field level. </p><p>Here we present Beyond Cloud, a product which is the first to leverage computer vision and machine learning approaches in order to provide fused optic and SAR based crop health information. Field level learning is especially well-suited for inherently noisy SAR datasets. Several use cases are presented over agriculture fields located throughout the United Kingdom, France and Belgium, where cloud cover limits optic based solutions to as little as 2-3 images per growing season. Preliminary efforts for additional features to the product including automated crop and soil type detection are also discussed. Beyond Cloud can be accessed via a simple API which makes integration of the results easy for existing dashboards and smart-ag tools. Overall, these efforts promote the accessibility of satellite imagery for real agriculture end users.</p><p> </p>


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Li ◽  
Desheng Wu

PurposeThe infraction of securities regulations (ISRs) of listed firms in their day-to-day operations and management has become one of common problems. This paper proposed several machine learning approaches to forecast the risk at infractions of listed corporates to solve financial problems that are not effective and precise in supervision.Design/methodology/approachThe overall proposed research framework designed for forecasting the infractions (ISRs) include data collection and cleaning, feature engineering, data split, prediction approach application and model performance evaluation. We select Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, Artificial Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) as ISRs prediction models.FindingsThe research results show that prediction performance of proposed models with the prior infractions provides a significant improvement of the ISRs than those without prior, especially for large sample set. The results also indicate when judging whether a company has infractions, we should pay attention to novel artificial intelligence methods, previous infractions of the company, and large data sets.Originality/valueThe findings could be utilized to address the problems of identifying listed corporates' ISRs at hand to a certain degree. Overall, results elucidate the value of the prior infraction of securities regulations (ISRs). This shows the importance of including more data sources when constructing distress models and not only focus on building increasingly more complex models on the same data. This is also beneficial to the regulatory authorities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Francoeur ◽  
Tomohide Masuda ◽  
David R. Koes

One of the main challenges in drug discovery is predicting protein-ligand binding affinity. Recently, machine learning approaches have made substantial progress on this task. However, current methods of model evaluation are overly optimistic in measuring generalization to new targets, and there does not exist a standard dataset of sufficient size to compare performance between models. We present a new dataset for structure-based machine learning, the CrossDocked2020 set, with 22.5 million poses of ligands docked into multiple similar binding pockets across the Protein Data Bank and perform a comprehensive evaluation of grid-based convolutional neural network models on this dataset. We also demonstrate how the partitioning of the training data and test data can impact the results of models trained with the PDBbind dataset, how performance improves by adding more, lower-quality training data, and how training with docked poses imparts pose sensitivity to the predicted affinity of a complex. Our best performing model, an ensemble of 5 densely connected convolutional newtworks, achieves a root mean squared error of 1.42 and Pearson R of 0.612 on the affinity prediction task, an AUC of 0.956 at binding pose classification, and a 68.4% accuracy at pose selection on the CrossDocked2020 set. By providing data splits for clustered cross-validation and the raw data for the CrossDocked2020 set, we establish the first standardized dataset for training machine learning models to recognize ligands in non-cognate target structures while also greatly expanding the number of poses available for training. In order to facilitate community adoption of this dataset for benchmarking protein-ligand binding affinity prediction, we provide our models, weights, and the CrossDocked2020 set at https://github.com/gnina/models.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haibin Di ◽  
Chakib Kada Kloucha ◽  
Cen Li ◽  
Aria Abubakar ◽  
Zhun Li ◽  
...  

Abstract Delineating seismic stratigraphic features and depositional facies is of importance to successful reservoir mapping and identification in the subsurface. Robust seismic stratigraphy interpretation is confronted with two major challenges. The first one is to maximally automate the process particularly with the increasing size of seismic data and complexity of target stratigraphies, while the second challenge is to efficiently incorporate available structures into stratigraphy model building. Machine learning, particularly convolutional neural network (CNN), has been introduced into assisting seismic stratigraphy interpretation through supervised learning. However, the small amount of available expert labels greatly restricts the performance of such supervised CNN. Moreover, most of the exiting CNN implementations are based on only amplitude, which fails to use necessary structural information such as faults for constraining the machine learning. To resolve both challenges, this paper presents a semi-supervised learning workflow for fault-guided seismic stratigraphy interpretation, which consists of two components. The first component is seismic feature engineering (SFE), which aims at learning the provided seismic and fault data through a unsupervised convolutional autoencoder (CAE), while the second one is stratigraphy model building (SMB), which aims at building an optimal mapping function between the features extracted from the SFE CAE and the target stratigraphic labels provided by an experienced interpreter through a supervised CNN. Both components are connected by embedding the encoder of the SFE CAE into the SMB CNN, which forces the SMB learning based on these features commonly existing in the entire study area instead of those only at the limited training data; correspondingly, the risk of overfitting is greatly eliminated. More innovatively, the fault constraint is introduced by customizing the SMB CNN of two output branches, with one to match the target stratigraphies and the other to reconstruct the input fault, so that the fault continues contributing to the process of SMB learning. The performance of such fault-guided seismic stratigraphy interpretation is validated by an application to a real seismic dataset, and the machine prediction not only matches the manual interpretation accurately but also clearly illustrates the depositional process in the study area.


Author(s):  
Sachin Kumar ◽  
Karan Veer

Aims: The objective of this research is to predict the covid-19 cases in India based on the machine learning approaches. Background: Covid-19, a respiratory disease caused by one of the coronavirus family members, has led to a pandemic situation worldwide in 2020. This virus was detected firstly in Wuhan city of China in December 2019. This viral disease has taken less than three months to spread across the globe. Objective: In this paper, we proposed a regression model based on the Support vector machine (SVM) to forecast the number of deaths, the number of recovered cases, and total confirmed cases for the next 30 days. Method: For prediction, the data is collected from Github and the ministry of India's health and family welfare from March 14, 2020, to December 3, 2020. The model has been designed in Python 3.6 in Anaconda to forecast the forecasting value of corona trends until September 21, 2020. The proposed methodology is based on the prediction of values using SVM based regression model with polynomial, linear, rbf kernel. The dataset has been divided into train and test datasets with 40% and 60% test size and verified with real data. The model performance parameters are evaluated as a mean square error, mean absolute error, and percentage accuracy. Results and Conclusion: The results show that the polynomial model has obtained 95 % above accuracy score, linear scored above 90%, and rbf scored above 85% in predicting cumulative death, conformed cases, and recovered cases.


2022 ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
Rajalaxmi Prabhu B. ◽  
Seema S.

A lot of user-generated data is available these days from huge platforms, blogs, websites, and other review sites. These data are usually unstructured. Analyzing sentiments from these data automatically is considered an important challenge. Several machine learning algorithms are implemented to check the opinions from large data sets. A lot of research has been undergone in understanding machine learning approaches to analyze sentiments. Machine learning mainly depends on the data required for model building, and hence, suitable feature exactions techniques also need to be carried. In this chapter, several deep learning approaches, its challenges, and future issues will be addressed. Deep learning techniques are considered important in predicting the sentiments of users. This chapter aims to analyze the deep-learning techniques for predicting sentiments and understanding the importance of several approaches for mining opinions and determining sentiment polarity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Withnall ◽  
E. Lindelöf ◽  
O. Engkvist ◽  
H. Chen

AbstractNeural Message Passing for graphs is a promising and relatively recent approach for applying Machine Learning to networked data. As molecules can be described intrinsically as a molecular graph, it makes sense to apply these techniques to improve molecular property prediction in the field of cheminformatics. We introduce Attention and Edge Memory schemes to the existing message passing neural network framework, and benchmark our approaches against eight different physical–chemical and bioactivity datasets from the literature. We remove the need to introduce a priori knowledge of the task and chemical descriptor calculation by using only fundamental graph-derived properties. Our results consistently perform on-par with other state-of-the-art machine learning approaches, and set a new standard on sparse multi-task virtual screening targets. We also investigate model performance as a function of dataset preprocessing, and make some suggestions regarding hyperparameter selection.


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