Understanding the adaptation process of plants to drought stress is essential
in improving management practices, breeding strategies as well as engineering
viable crops for a sustainable agriculture in the coming decades.
Hyper-spectral imaging provides a particularly promising approach to gain such
understanding since it allows to discover non-destructively spectral
characteristics of plants governed primarily by scattering and absorption
characteristics of the leaf internal structure and biochemical constituents.
Several drought stress indices have been derived using hyper-spectral imaging.
However, they are typically based on few hyper-spectral images only, rely on
interpretations of experts, and consider few wavelengths only. In this study,
we present the first data-driven approach to discovering spectral drought
stress indices, treating it as an unsupervised labeling problem at massive
scale. To make use of short range dependencies of spectral wavelengths, we
develop an online variational Bayes algorithm for latent Dirichlet allocation
with convolved Dirichlet regularizer. This approach scales to massive datasets
and, hence, provides a more objective complement to plant physiological
practices. The spectral topics found conform to plant physiological knowledge
and can be computed in a fraction of the time compared to existing LDA
approaches.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2012
