Spatiotemporal transformer modeling of satellite fire detection confidence under climate variability
摘要
This study investigates multi-class modeling of VIIRS satellite fire detection confidence levels (low, medium, high) using twelve years (2012–2023) of thermal, radiative, spatial, and temporal observations over Saudi Arabia. Detection confidence is formulated as a reliability-oriented structured learning problem. Transformer architectures with distinct representation and reasoning paradigms are systematically compared against conventional machine-learning baselines under a temporally stratified validation protocol to ensure robustness across interannual variability. Transformer-based models demonstrate substantially improved discrimination and regression-consistency performance relative to classical baselines. Qwen3 achieves the highest overall accuracy (0.999), F1-score (0.993), and