Ship classification based on random forest using static information from AIS data

Abstract

With the wide use of automatic identification system (AIS), a large amount of ship-related data has been provided for marine transportation analysis. Generally, AIS reports the type information of ships, but there are still many ships with type unknown in AIS data. It is necessary to develop algorithms which can identify ship type from AIS data. In this paper, we employ random forest to classify ships according to the static information from AIS messages. Moreover, the importance of static features is discussed, which explains the reason why some classes of ships are misclassified. The method of this paper is proved to be effective in ship classification using static information.