Analysis of sea surface temperature maps via topological machine learning

Abstract

Computational methods to leverage topological features occurring in signals and images are currently one of the most innovative trends in applied mathematics. In this paper a pipeline of topological machine learning is applied to the challenging task of classifying four specific marine mesoscale patterns from remote sensing data, i.e., Sea Surface Temperature maps of the southwestern region of the Iberian Peninsula. Our preliminary study achieves an accuracy of 56% in the 4-label classification. Such results are encouraging, especially considering that the data are affected by noise and that there are low-quality/missing data. Also, the paper devises directions for future improvements.