Facilitating efficient data analysis of remotely sensed images using standards-based parameter sweep models

Classification of remote sensing images often use Support Vector Machines (SVMs) that require an n-fold cross-validation phase in order to do model selection. This phase is characterized by sweeping through a wide set of parameter combinations of SVM kernel and cost parameters. As a consequence this process is computationally expensive but represents a principled way of tuning a model for better accuracy and to prevent overfitting together with regularization that is in SVMs inherently solved in the optimization. Since the cross-validation technique is done in a principled way also known as 'gridsearch', we aim at supporting remote sensing scientists in two ways. Firstly by reducing the time-to-solution of the cross-validation by applying state-of-the-art parallel processing methods because the sweep of parameters and cross-validation runs itself can be nicely parallelized. Secondly by reducing manual labour by automating the parallel submission processes since manually performing cross-validation is very time consuming, unintuitive, and error-prone especially in large-scale cluster or supercomputing environments (e.g., batch job scripts, node/core/task parameters, etc.).