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Title: Scalable time series change detection for biomass monitoring using gaussian process

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1081662

Biomass monitoring, specifically detecting changes in the biomass or vegetation of a geographical region, is vital for studying the carbon cycle of the system and has significant implications in the context of understanding climate change and its impacts. Recently, several time series change detection methods have been proposed to identify land cover changes in temporal profiles (time series) of vegetation collected using remote sensing instruments. In this paper, we adapt Gaussian process regression to detect changes in such time series in an online fashion. While Gaussian process (GP) has been widely used as a kernel based learning method for regression and classification, their applicability to massive spatio-temporal data sets, such as remote sensing data, has been limited owing to the high computational costs involved. In this paper we address the scalability aspect of GP based time series change detection. Specifically, we exploit the special structure of the covariance matrix generated for GP analysis to come up with methods that can efficiently estimate the hyper-parameters associated with GP as well as identify changes in the time series while requiring a memory footprint which is linear in the size of input data, as compared to traditional method which involves solving a linear system of equations for the Choleksy decomposition of the quadratic sized covariance matrix. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves significant speedups, as high as 1000, when processing long time series, while maintaining a small memory footprint. To further improve the computational complexity of the proposed method, we provide a parallel version which can concurrently process multiple input time series using the same set of hyper-parameters. The parallel version exploits the natural parallelization potential of the serial algorithm and is shown to perform significantly better than the serial version, with speedups as high as 10. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed change detection method in identifying changes in Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data. Moreover, we show that the scalable solution is able to process NDVI data for the entire Iowa region significantly faster than the standard method.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
DOE Contract Number:
DE-AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1081662
Resource Relation:
Conference: NASA Conference on Intelligent Data Understanding, Mountain View, CA, USA, 20101005, 20101007
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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