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Ammonoid taxonomy with supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithmsuse asterix (*) to get italics
Floe FoxonPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"
2021
<p>Ammonoid identification is crucial to biostratigraphy, systematic palaeontology, and evolutionary biology, but may prove difficult when shell features and sutures are poorly preserved. This necessitates novel approaches to ammonoid taxonomy. This study aimed to taxonomize ammonoids by their conch geometry using supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Ammonoid measurement data (conch diameter, whorl height, whorl width, and umbilical width) were taken from the Paleobiology Database (PBDB). 11 species with ≥50 specimens each were identified providing N=781 total unique specimens. Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, K-Nearest Neighbours, Support Vector Machine, and Multilayer Perceptron classifiers were applied to the PBDB data with a 5x5 nested cross-validation approach to obtain unbiased generalization performance estimates across a grid search of algorithm parameters. All supervised classifiers achieved ≥70% accuracy in identifying ammonoid species, with Naive Bayes demonstrating the least over-fitting. The unsupervised clustering algorithms K-Means, DBSCAN, OPTICS, Mean Shift, and Affinity Propagation achieved Normalized Mutual Information scores of ≥0.6, with the centroid-based methods having most success. This presents a reasonably-accurate proof-of-concept approach to ammonoid classification which may assist identification in cases where more traditional methods are not feasible.</p>
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Ammonoid; Ammonoidea; Machine Learning; Classification; Taxonomy
NonePlease indicate the methods that may require specialised expertise during the peer review process (use a comma to separate various required expertises).
Invertebrate paleontology, Taxonomy
No need for them to be recommenders of PCIPaleo. Please do not suggest reviewers for whom there might be a conflict of interest. Reviewers are not allowed to review preprints written by close colleagues (with whom they have published in the last four years, with whom they have received joint funding in the last four years, or with whom they are currently writing a manuscript, or submitting a grant proposal), or by family members, friends, or anyone for whom bias might affect the nature of the review - see the code of conduct
e.g. John Doe [john@doe.com]
2021-01-06 11:48:35
Kenneth De Baets
Jérémie Bardin