Semi-supervised learning for integration of aerosol predictions from multiple satellite instruments

  • Authors:
  • Nemanja Djuric;Lakesh Kansakar;Slobodan Vucetic

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University;Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University;Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'13 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), recognized as one of the most important quantities in understanding and predicting the Earth's climate, is estimated daily on a global scale by several Earth-observing satellite instruments. Each instrument has different coverage and sensitivity to atmospheric and surface conditions, and, as a result, the quality of AOD estimated by different instruments varies across the globe. We present a method for learning how to aggregate AOD estimations from multiple satellite instruments into a more accurate estimation. The proposed method is semi-supervised, as it is able to learn from a small number of labeled data, where labels come from a few accurate and expensive ground-based instruments, and a large number of unlabeled data. The method uses a latent variable to partition the data, so that in each partition the expert AOD estimations are aggregated in a different, optimal way. We applied the method to combine AOD estimations from 5 instruments aboard 4 satellites, and the results indicate that it can successfully exploit labeled and unlabeled data to produce accurate aggregated AOD estimations.