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I have a Landsat-NDVI-time series from 2013 - 2017 with 23 observations per year (115 scenes in total). My goal is to get a smooth time series for a selected single pixel (maybe by using a Savitzky-Golay filter) but also get a trend map for all pixels in my research area. I first calculated the missing dates, created a raster with NA values for each of these scenes, and stacked all of the files together.

Example of the output for one pixel:

    Date          NDVI
 2013-01-02       NA
 2013-01-18       NA
 2013-02-03       NA
  [...]
 2017-08-25  0.4551642537
 2017-09-10  0.3888225853
 2017-09-26  0.6013333797

Now I would like to calculate a smooth time series for this pixel. If I interpolate before applying the time series I get an irregular time series because the first year than only contains 19 observations. I tried following this tutorial, but could not get it to work. How can I handle this problem and more importantly, how can I calculate a pixel-wise regression for the whole scene? I found this, which seems to cover my needs, but can I apply it to an irregular time series?

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  • you could try whittaker and initialize with data from the next year, but with gaps of several month I would not expect good results with any method.
    – radouxju
    Apr 13, 2018 at 13:22
  • I am aware that the results might be bad, but I have no other option than using LS-data. Apr 13, 2018 at 13:38
  • do you really need the 30 m resolution ? Otherwise you could use MODIS 250 m or PROBA-V 100m(only available since 2014). also going from 0.45 to 0.39 and back to 0.60 is very strange in just one month
    – radouxju
    Apr 13, 2018 at 13:56
  • The data is not cleaned up to far, so there might be odd values to it. And yes, I need them. I try to map vegetation development after rock ice avalanches, so 250m/100m resolution is too coarse. Apr 13, 2018 at 14:07
  • Which kind of fill method are you looking for? You can create a linear model between NA values and use it to fill values.
    – aldo_tapia
    Apr 13, 2018 at 15:22

1 Answer 1

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Here is an approach that imputes NA values based on a local polynomial regression (loess). The default smoothing parameter (s) is fairly stable but, if the data is stochastic (say, climate data), is also something that you may want to test.

I would also point out that, in the temporal analysis literature, it is common practice to smooth a time-series using a loess regression. I added an argument "smooth.data" that allows for the function to return not only imputed NA values but also the smoothed time-series. If smooth.data = FALSE only the NA values are replaced else all of the values are replace with the smoothed loess estimate. If the data is smoothed attention needs to be paid to the smoothing parameter (s) to ensure that the data is being adequately smoothed without also changing the properties of the original distribution. In a recent monthly 20-year LAI trend analysis I found that the default s=0.80 was adequate for imputation of NA values however, was too aggressive in smoothing the entire time-series. I had to specify s=0.30 to achieve the desired smoothing.

#### Loess impute function
# y            Vector with NA values or to be smoothed
# x.length     length of resulting vector
# s            Smoothing parameter (see loess span argument)
# smooth.data  (FALSE/TRUE) smooth all of the data
impute.loess <- function(y, x.length = NULL, s = 0.80, 
                         smooth.data = FALSE, ...) {
  if(is.null(x.length)) { x.length = length(y) }
    options(warn=-1)
    x <- 1:x.length
    p <- loess(y ~ x, span = s, data.frame(x=x, y=y))
    if(smooth.data == TRUE) {
      y <- predict(p, x)
    } else {
      na.idx <- which( is.na(y) )
        if( length(na.idx) > 1 ) {
          y[na.idx] <- predict(p, data.frame(x=na.idx))
        }
    }   
  return(y)
}

Here we apply the impute.loess function. I have had numerous problems using calc to apply this function so, I am using a for loop to iterate through the rows of the raster stack with getValues. An alternative approach is to coerce into a SpatialPixelsDataFrame and operate on the @data slot using apply, the same as below. This is more direct and does not require the back-and-forth between raster and sp. In this example, I make a copy of the raster stack and populate it with NA values. To be memory safe you could use writeStart and writeValues to create and write to a raster on disk.

ndvi.new <- ndvi
ndvi.new[] <- NA
  for( rl in 1:nrow(ndvi) ) { 
    v <- getValues(ndvi, rl, 1)
    ndvi.new[rl,] <- as.matrix(t(apply(v, MARGIN=1, FUN=impute.loess)))
  }

Since apply can take additional function arguments you can change the s and smooth.data agruments by supplying them after the loess.smooth call in apply eg.,

as.matrix(t(apply(v, MARGIN=1, FUN=impute.loess, smooth.data = TRUE, s = 0.20)))

Occasionally, this function will miss NA values on the absolute tails of the time-series because it is impossible to converge on an end value. This is a statistical limitation and can only really be solved by taking the next/previous value and assigning to the missing data. You could add an if/else statement in the function to account for this or just deal with it in your analysis.

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  • In this case, x is an equal-spaced vector. I think x must be a parameter rather than x.lenght to solve the question
    – aldo_tapia
    Apr 13, 2018 at 17:51
  • @aldo_tapia if you look at the function it is a parameter 1:x.length which is the sequential ordering of y. As long at it remains ordered, it can be equal-spaced or an irregular time-series. This is fairly standard in smoothing and analysis of time-series data. I have used this function and it works as expected. Apr 13, 2018 at 18:18
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    Dear @JeffreyEvans, I did not expect such a detailed answer. Thank you very much for this! I adapted your code to my needs and it works like a charm; I might have to play around with the s-parameter to find the balance between my data and oversmoothing, as you mentioned. I think you just saved a major part of my thesis. Apr 14, 2018 at 9:38
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    @AldiKasse2, For the trend analysis that you are eventually wanting to implement, take a look at the raster.kendall function in the spatialEco package. It returns rasters for the trend slope, the Kendall Tau, p-value, z-value, +/- 95% confidence interval. To identify significant trend you can threshold the z value raster at the expected critical z value: downward trend [Z < -1.46] & upward trend [z > 1.46]. Apr 16, 2018 at 16:42

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