An Ensemble Classification Method Based on a Stacking Strategy for Ship Type Classification with AIS Data

Ship type (e.g., Cargo, Tanker and Fishing) classification is crucial for marine management, environmental protection, and maritime safety, as it enhances navigation safety and aids regulatory agencies in combating illegal activities. Traditional ship type classification methods with AIS data are often plagued by problems such as data imbalance, insufficient feature extraction, reliance on single-model approaches, or unscientific model combination methods, which reduce the accuracy of classification. In this paper, we propose an ensemble classification method based on a stacking strategy to overcome these challenges. We apply the SMOTE technique to balance the dataset by generating minority class samples. Then, a more comprehensive ship behavior model is developed by combining static and dynamic features. A stacking strategy is adopted for the classification, integrating multiple tree structure-based classifiers to improve classification performance. The experimental results show that the ensemble classification method based on the stacking strategy outperforms traditional classifiers such as CatBoost, Random Forest, Decision Tree, LightGBM, and the ensemble classification method, especially in terms of improving classification precision, recall, F1 score, ROC curve, and AUC. This method improves the accuracy of ship type recognition, and it is suitable to real-time online classification, which is helpful for applications in marine safety monitoring, law enforcement, and illegal fishing detection.