Confident Naturalness Explanation (CNE): A Framework to Explain and Assess Patterns Forming Naturalness
This work addresses the need for valid, objective explanations and quantitative metrics in environmental monitoring, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing explainable ML and uncertainty methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of explaining and assessing naturalness in protected areas by proposing the Confident Naturalness Explanation (CNE) framework, which combines explainable machine learning and uncertainty quantification to provide a quantitative metric for pattern contributions and uncertainty-aware segmentation masks, demonstrated on satellite datasets from Fennoscandia.
Protected natural areas are regions that have been minimally affected by human activities such as urbanization, agriculture, and other human interventions. To better understand and map the naturalness of these areas, machine learning models can be used to analyze satellite imagery. Specifically, explainable machine learning methods show promise in uncovering patterns that contribute to the concept of naturalness within these protected environments. Additionally, addressing the uncertainty inherent in machine learning models is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of this concept. However, existing approaches have limitations. They either fail to provide explanations that are both valid and objective or struggle to offer a quantitative metric that accurately measures the contribution of specific patterns to naturalness, along with the associated confidence. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called the Confident Naturalness Explanation (CNE) framework. This framework combines explainable machine learning and uncertainty quantification to assess and explain naturalness. We introduce a new quantitative metric that describes the confident contribution of patterns to the concept of naturalness. Furthermore, we generate an uncertainty-aware segmentation mask for each input sample, highlighting areas where the model lacks knowledge. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we apply it to a study site in Fennoscandia using two open-source satellite datasets.