Forest Type Classification Project

Random Forest Classifier

Project Description

This is a competition project hosted on Kaggle.com

In this project we’ll predict what types of trees there are in an area based on various geographic features.

Data Set

The datasets comes from a study conducted in four wilderness areas within the beautiful Roosevelt National Forest of northern Colorado. These areas represent forests with very little human disturbances – the existing forest cover types there are more a result of ecological processes rather than forest management practices. The data is in raw form and contains categorical data such as wilderness areas and soil type.

Acknowledgements: This dataset was provided by Jock A. Blackard and Colorado State University. We also thank the UCI machine learning repository for hosting the dataset. Data set can be downloaded from this link

Data Description

The study area includes four wilderness areas located in the Roosevelt National Forest of northern Colorado. Each observation is a 30m x 30m patch. You are asked to predict an integer classification for the forest cover type. The seven types are:

1 - Spruce/Fir

2 - Lodgepole Pine

3 - Ponderosa Pine

4 - Cottonwood/Willow

5 - Aspen

6 - Douglas-fir

7 - Krummholz

The training set (15120 observations) contains both features and the CoverType. The test set contains only the features. You must predict the CoverType for every row in the test set (565892 observations).

Data Fields

Elevation - Elevation in meters

Aspect - Aspect in degrees azimuth

Slope - Slope in degrees

HorizontalDistanceTo_Hydrology - Horz Dist to nearest surface water features

VerticalDistanceTo_Hydrology - Vert Dist to nearest surface water features

HorizontalDistanceTo_Roadways - Horz Dist to nearest roadway

Hillshade_9am (0 to 255 index) - Hillshade index at 9am, summer solstice

Hillshade_Noon (0 to 255 index) - Hillshade index at noon, summer solstice

Hillshade_3pm (0 to 255 index) - Hillshade index at 3pm, summer solstice

HorizontalDistanceToFirePoints - Horz Dist to nearest wildfire ignition points

Wilderness_Area (4 binary columns, 0 = absence or 1 = presence) - Wilderness area designation

Soil_Type (40 binary columns, 0 = absence or 1 = presence) - Soil Type designation

Cover_Type (7 types, integers 1 to 7) - Forest Cover Type designation

The wilderness areas are:

1 - Rawah Wilderness Area

2 - Neota Wilderness Area

3 - Comanche Peak Wilderness Area

4 - Cache la Poudre Wilderness Area

The soil types are:

1 Cathedral family - Rock outcrop complex, extremely stony.

2 Vanet - Ratake families complex, very stony.

3 Haploborolis - Rock outcrop complex, rubbly.

4 Ratake family - Rock outcrop complex, rubbly.

5 Vanet family - Rock outcrop complex complex, rubbly.

6 Vanet - Wetmore families - Rock outcrop complex, stony.

7 Gothic family.

8 Supervisor - Limber families complex.

9 Troutville family, very stony.

10 Bullwark - Catamount families - Rock outcrop complex, rubbly.

11 Bullwark - Catamount families - Rock land complex, rubbly.

12 Legault family - Rock land complex, stony.

13 Catamount family - Rock land - Bullwark family complex, rubbly.

14 Pachic Argiborolis - Aquolis complex.

15 unspecified in the USFS Soil and ELU Survey.

16 Cryaquolis - Cryoborolis complex.

17 Gateview family - Cryaquolis complex.

18 Rogert family, very stony.

19 Typic Cryaquolis - Borohemists complex.

20 Typic Cryaquepts - Typic Cryaquolls complex.

21 Typic Cryaquolls - Leighcan family, till substratum complex.

22 Leighcan family, till substratum, extremely bouldery.

23 Leighcan family, till substratum - Typic Cryaquolls complex.

24 Leighcan family, extremely stony.

25 Leighcan family, warm, extremely stony.

26 Granile - Catamount families complex, very stony.

27 Leighcan family, warm - Rock outcrop complex, extremely stony.

28 Leighcan family - Rock outcrop complex, extremely stony.

29 Como - Legault families complex, extremely stony.

30 Como family - Rock land - Legault family complex, extremely stony.

31 Leighcan - Catamount families complex, extremely stony.

32 Catamount family - Rock outcrop - Leighcan family complex, extremely stony.

33 Leighcan - Catamount families - Rock outcrop complex, extremely stony.

34 Cryorthents - Rock land complex, extremely stony.

35 Cryumbrepts - Rock outcrop - Cryaquepts complex.

36 Bross family - Rock land - Cryumbrepts complex, extremely stony.

37 Rock outcrop - Cryumbrepts - Cryorthents complex, extremely stony.

38 Leighcan - Moran families - Cryaquolls complex, extremely stony.

39 Moran family - Cryorthents - Leighcan family complex, extremely stony.

40 Moran family - Cryorthents - Rock land complex, extremely stony.

Evaluation

Models are evaluated on categorization accuracy.

Complete project notebook can be found on my github repository