A Proposed Ensemble Feature Selection Method for Estimating Forest Aboveground Biomass from Multiple Satellite Data

Feature selection (FS) can increase the accuracy of forest aboveground biomass (AGB) prediction from multiple satellite data and identify important predictors, but the role of FS in AGB estimation has not received sufficient attention. Here, we aimed to quantify the degree to which FS can benefit forest AGB prediction. To this end, we extracted a series of features from Landsat, Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR), and climatic and topographical information, and evaluated the performance of four state-of-the-art FS methods in selecting predictive features and improving the estimation accuracy with selected features. We then proposed an ensemble FS method that takes inro account the stability of an individual FS algorithm with respect to different training datasets used; the heterogeneity or diversity of different FS methods; the correlations between features and forest AGB; and the multicollinearity between the selected features. We further investigated the performance of the proposed stability-heterogeneity-correlation-based ensemble (SHCE) method for AGB estimation. The results showed that selected features by SHCE provided a more accurate prediction of forest AGB than existing state-of-the-art FS methods, with R-2 = 0.66 +/- 0.01, RMSE = 14.35 +/- 0.12 Mg ha(-1), MAE = 9.34 +/- 0.09 Mg ha(-1), and bias = 1.67 +/- 0.11 Mg ha(-1) at 90 m resolution. Boruta yielded comparable prediction accuracy of forest AGB, but could not identify the importance of features, which led to a slightly greater bias than the proposed SHCE method. SHCE not only ranked selected features by importance but provided feature subsets that enabled accurate AGB prediction. Moreover, SHCE provides a flexible framework to combine FS results, which will be crucial in many scenarios, particularly the wide-area mapping of land-surface parameters from various satellite datasets.

Automated summary

Feature selection can improve the accuracy of forest aboveground biomass (AGB) prediction and identify important predictors, but its role in AGB estimation has not received sufficient attention. This study quantified the benefits of feature selection in AGB prediction and proposed a stability-heterogeneity-correlation-based ensemble (SHCE) method that outperformed existing FS methods in terms of prediction accuracy and identification of important features.