A multi-model ensemble approach to seabed mapping

•We apply a multiple classifier system to seabed substrate mapping.•Multi-model ensemble consists of up to five different machine learning classifiers.•We assess prediction accuracies and their statistical significance.•We propose a measure of confidence based on accuracy and model agreement.

Seabed habitat mapping based on swath acoustic data and ground-truth samples is an emergent and active marine science discipline. Significant progress could be achieved by transferring techniques and approaches that have been successfully developed and employed in such fields as terrestrial land cover mapping. One such promising approach is the multiple classifier system, which aims at improving classification performance by combining the outputs of several classifiers. Here we present results of a multi-model ensemble applied to multibeam acoustic data covering more than 5000 km2 of seabed in the North Sea with the aim to derive accurate spatial predictions of seabed substrate. A suite of six machine learning classifiers (k-Nearest Neighbour, Support Vector Machine, Classification Tree, Random Forest, Neural Network and Naïve Bayes) was trained with ground-truth sample data classified into seabed substrate classes and their prediction accuracy was assessed with an independent set of samples. The three and five best performing models were combined to classifier ensembles. Both ensembles led to increased prediction accuracy as compared to the best performing single classifier. The improvements were however not statistically significant at the 5% level. Although the three-model ensemble did not perform significantly better than its individual component models, we noticed that the five-model ensemble did perform significantly better than three of the five component models. A classifier ensemble might therefore be an effective strategy to improve classification performance. Another advantage is the fact that the agreement in predicted substrate class between the individual models of the ensemble could be used as a measure of confidence. We propose a simple and spatially explicit measure of confidence that is based on model agreement and prediction accuracy.