Will Whooping Cranes Stop Here?
From the mix of wetland, cropland and grassland around a spot, will migrating whooping cranes use it as a stopover? There are only a few hundred of these birds in the wild, so protecting the right places matters.
The table
Locations along the cranes' migration route with land-cover composition at several distances and the date, labelled by whether cranes stopped there. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Whooping Crane Stopover Habitat, 30,407 rows by 57 columns, licensed CC0. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.50. At 30,407 rows and 56 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 2,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.
Walkthrough
Load it from the catalogue
Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.
import pandas as pd from welt import Client with Client() as client: item = client.research_datasets(q="whooping crane stopover", limit=1)["items"][0] info = client.research_dataset(item["id"]) data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"]) target = info["targets"][0] target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)Pick the rows
Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 2,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.
known = data.dropna(subset=[target]) new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1) table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(2000, random_state=7)Compare the models and predict
The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. ROC AUC runs from 0.5, a coin toss, to 1, a perfect ranking, and a lower Brier score means the probabilities can be trusted more. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.
with Client() as client: evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="classification", seed=7, models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"]) model = evaluation.fit() print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "roc_auc_mean", "brier_mean"]]) features = new_rows.drop(columns=target) print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features), "probability": model.predict_proba(features).max(axis=1)}))
What you get
Try it
Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "whooping crane stopover", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".
Open with
- Type
- Use case
- Area
- Biology
- Question
- Will Whooping Cranes Stop Here?
- Model
- TabICLv2, Kumo Tabular Medium
- Data
- Whooping Crane Stopover Habitat, 30,407 rows
- For
- Conservation biologists and land managers
- Licence
- CC0