Maximum variance unfolding based co-location decision tree for remote sensing image classification

Since conventional decision tree (DT) induction methods cannot efficiently take advantage of geospatial knowledge in the classification of remotely sensed imagery, a co-location decision tree (CL-DT) method, combining the co-location technique with the conventional DT method, has been proposed by several researchers. However, the CL-DT method only considers the Euclidean distance of neighborhood events, which cannot truly reflect the co-location relationship between instances for which there is a nonlinear distribution in a high-dimensional space. For this reason, this paper develops the theory and method for a maximum variance unfolding (MVU)-based CL-DT method (known as MVU-based CL-DT). The presented method has been validated by classifying remote sensing image and is compared with CL-DT method and random forest (RF) method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can better construct decision tree and reach a high classification accuracy.