Learning representations of features of fish for performing regression tasks

Sammanfattning: In the ever-changing landscape of the fishing industry, demands for automating specific processes are increasing substantially. Predicting future events eliminates much of the existing communication latency between fishing vessels and their customers and makes real-time analysis of onboard catch possible for the fishing industry. Further, machine learning models, may reduce the number of human resources necessary for the numerous processes that may be automated. In this document, we focus on weight estimation of three different species of fish. Namely, we want to estimate the fish weight given its specie through datadriven techniques. Due to the high complexity of image data, the overhead expenses of collecting images at sea, and the complexities of fish features, we consider a dimensionality reduction on the inputs to reduce the curse of dimensionality and increase interpretability. We will study the viability of modeling fish weights from lower-dimensional feature vectors and the conjunction of lower-dimensional feature vectors and algorithmically obtained features. We found that modeling the residuals with latent representations of a simple power model fitted on length features resulted in a significant difference in the weight estimates for two types of fish and a decrease in Root Mean Squared Error (rMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) scores in favour of the estimations utilizing latent representations.