Wildfire Mapping in Interior Alaska Using Deep Neural Networks on Imbalanced Datasets
Wildfires are the dominant disturbance impacting many regions in Alaska and is expected to intensify due to climate change. Accurate tracking and quantification of wildfires are important for climate modeling and ecological studies in this region. Remote sensing platforms (e.g., MODIS, Landsat) are an important tool for mapping wildfires in Alaska at varying spatial and temporal scales. Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown superior performance in many classification problems such as high-dimensional remote sensing data. Detection of wildfires is an imbalanced classification problem where one class contains a much smaller or larger sample size and DNNs performance can decline. We take a known weight-selection strategy during DNN training and apply them to MODIS variables (e.g., NDVI, surface reflectance) for a binary classification (i.e., wildfire or no-wildfire) across Alaska during the 2004 wildfire year, which is one of the largest on record. The method splits the input training data into sets, one for training the DNN to update weights and the other that splits into a validation set that is equally balanced between the wildfire and no-wildfire class. The performance is monitored on the validation set to select the weights based on the best validation-loss score. This approach was applied to two sampled datasets, such as where the no-wildfire class can significantly outweigh the wildfire class. The normal DNN training strategy was unable to map wildfires for the highly imbalanced dataset, however, the weight-selection strategy was able to map wildfires very accurately (0.96 recall score for 78,702 wildfire pixels (500×500 m)).