Geoscientists are increasingly tasked with spatially predicting a target variable in the presence of auxiliary information using supervised machine learning algorithms. Typically, the target variable is observed at a few sampling locations due to the relatively time-consuming and costly process of obtaining measurements. In contrast, auxiliary variables are often exhaustively observed within th…
The spatial prediction of a continuous response variable when spatially exhaustive predictor variables are available within the region under study has become ubiquitous in many geoscience fields. The response variable is often subject to detection limits due to limitations of the measuring instrument or the sampling protocol used. Consequently, the response variable's observations are censored …
Machine learning methods are increasingly used for spatially predicting a categorical target variable when spatially exhaustive predictor variables are available within the study region. Even though these methods exhibit competitive spatial prediction performance, they do not exactly honor the categorical target variable's observed values at sampling locations by construction. On the other side…
Regression random forest is becoming a widely-used machine learning technique for spatial prediction that shows competitive prediction performance in various geoscience fields. Like other popular machine learning methods for spatial prediction, regression random forest does not exactly honor the response variable’s measured values at sampled locations. However, competitor methods such as regr…