What are the "smile" type classifiers in Google Earth Engine API? I see for example ee.classifier.NaiveBayes and ee.classifier.SmileNaiveBayes with exactly the same description, and I couldn't find anything else on the net about the "smile" thing.
Apparently they are to improve the 'performance and stability'. The old classifiers are going to be removed eventually. This is all according to the GEE Dev team.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-earth-engine-developers/jXSgqCerhbs/sZOT5T2eAwAJ
The actual GEE site has no explanation about this that I could find. This is what the GEE Google Group announcement says.
Greetings Earth Engine developers!
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve Earth Engine, we will be migrating classifiers to a new system.
The new versions of classifiers are:
- ee.Classifier.smileCart replaces ee.Classifier.cart.
- ee.Classifer.smileRandomForest replaces ee.Classifier.randomForest.
- ee.Classifier.smileNaiveBayes replaces ee.Classifer.naiveBayes.
- ee.Classifer.libsvm replaces ee.Classifier.svm.
In many cases, the new versions have the same parameter sets as the old versions, though for some there are differences. We expect that performance and stability of the new versions should be better than the old versions.
The new versions of the CART and RandomForest classifiers allow access (via explain()) to more data than the old versions, including variable importance. Note that smileNaiveBayes truncates its inputs to integers (the fractional part is lost). If this is an issue, you may find that scaling the input values (e.g. by 10000) gives good results.
You should begin to migrate all code that uses the old classifiers to their new equivalents. In the future, the old classifiers will be removed. To avoid any break in service when those classifiers are eventually removed, please update to the new classifiers. If you have trouble with the smile transition, please post questions here.
The Google Earth Engine Team