SCALABLE TIME SERIES CHANGE DETECTION FOR BIOMASS MONITORING USING GAUSSIAN PROCESS

Biomass monitoring, specifically, detecting changes in the biomass or vegetation of a geographical region, is vital for studying the carbon cycle of the system and has significant implications in the context of understanding climate change and its impacts. Recently, several time series change detection methods have been proposed to identify land cover changes in temporal profiles (time series) of vegetation collected using remote sensing instruments.

In this paper, we adapt Gaussian process regression to detect changes in such time series in an online fashion. While Gaussian process (GP) has been widely used as a kernel based learning method for regression and classification, their applicability to massive spatio-temporal data sets, such as remote sensing data, has been limited owing to the high computational costs involved. In our previous work we proposed an efficient Toeplitz matrix based solution for scalable GP parameter estimation.