We Must All Pay More Attention to Rigor in Accuracy Assessment: Additional Comment to The Improvement of Land Cover Classification by Thermal Remote Sensing. Remote Sens. 2015, 7, 8368-8390

Despite recent calls for statistically robust and transparent accuracy assessment [1], further attention to rigor is still needed. Here I take the opportunity of a disputed accuracy assessment recently published in Remote Sensing [2-4] to highlight some issues regarding sampling design, response design and analysis that I often find as a reviewer, and that I too have neglected in the past, among them: (i) use of a sampling design that is purposive instead of probability based; (ii) use of suboptimal label allocation procedures for reference data; and (iii) incorrect computation of accuracy estimates and lack of reporting of confidence intervals. Following the good practices in [1] will enhance the scientific credibility of our discipline.