Performance evaluation of random forest and support vector regressions in natural hazard change detection

Information on land use and land cover changes is considered as a foremost requirement for monitoring environmental change. Developing change detection methodology in the remote sensing community is an active research topic. However, to the best of our knowledge, no research has been conducted so far on the application of random forest regression (RFR) and support vector regression (SVR) for natural hazard change detection from high-resolution optical remote sensing observations. Hence, the objective of this study is to examine the use of RFR and SVR to discriminate between changed and unchanged areas after a tsunami. For this study, RFR and SVR were applied to two different pilot coastlines in Indonesia and Japan. Two different remotely sensed data sets acquired by Quickbird and Ikonos sensors were used for efficient evaluation of the proposed methodology. The results demonstrated better performance of SVM compared to random forest (RF) with an overall accuracy higher by 3% to 4% and kappa coefficient by 0.05 to 0.07. Using McNemar’s test, statistically significant differences (Z≥1.96), at the 5% significance level, between the confusion matrices of the RF classifier and the support vector classifier were observed in both study areas. The high accuracy of change detection obtained in this study confirms that these methods have the potential to be used for detecting changes due to natural hazards.