PONE-D-22-20317Study of Various Machine Learning Approaches for Sentinel-2 Derived BathymetryPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chybicki,

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear authors,

Both reviewers see significant value in your work but have very significant issues with your manuscript presentation as well as analysis.

Please read them carefully as they both spent significant time and effort providing you constructive criticism on how to improve the manuscript.

In particular, both commented on problems with citations (missing, as well as formatting issues) as well as separation between what should be in the Results section (and associated statistics) vs. what should be in the Discussion section.

All the best, Emmanuel

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Literature is not correct. Some references are missing (i.e., Marks) and some others have wrong numbering.

Line 105, pg 9 of pdf. SDB is not something new. It start back in 80s and already has become an important tool (https://ihr.iho.int/articles/thirty-years-of-satellite-derived-bathymetry-the-charting-tool-that-hydrographers-can-no-longer-ignore/)

In table 1 please use same level of decadal numbers for all values. Also since readers might be confused by the state of both R and R squared, in might worth to use MAE metric and remove R (or provide explanations on what R gives in comparison to R squared).

The message take home at that work is unclear. The results and discussion sectors need to be rewritten and present in a logical approach where the reader can be benefit from reading instead of confusing.

In the methods approach, several band sets have varios data, from the bands per se to the quotient of bands' logarithms etc. Any multicollinearity test has been done to see if there is any redunduncy information?

For the Open Science, please provide a jupiter notebook with the developed code for the reproducability of the work.

Please add notes on what is needed by the user in order to test it with my own data

Reviewer #2: The manuscript is thorough and does investigate an interesting question of what current methods provide the most promising and accurate estimation of SDB. The methods are well laid out and it is clear that a considerable amount of original work went into this study. However, at present, this work is presented more like a report or a white paper rather than a scientific article. The objectives and rationale are poorly defined so while the results are interesting it is unclear why this work has been done and what gaps in our existing knowledge we are trying to fill. I encourage the authors to think carefully about what they are trying to add to the existing body of knowledge.

I also have some specific comments:

The introduction is confusing. It definitely needs more citations and it is unclear what argument you are trying to build. You should identify gaps in the scientific knowledge that you are specifically trying to address and why the gaps are a problem. Having an introduction and a background and theory section is also confusing - these sections should be merged into a more coherent overview and the weaknesses and gaps should be more clearly defined. It is important that the reader gets a firm idea of what problem is trying to be solved and what this paper will contribute to scientific knowledge. Some paragraphs are very short and do not contribute to the body of work convincingly. For example the last two paragraphs of introduction to SDB.

Some references are name and number some are number only

Try to avoid vague sentences such as “In the last years” on line 106. These have little specific meaning.

The introduction to GWR is set out like a list rather than a cohesive argument. It is informative but should be shortened.

The whole introduction sections should be reduced and combined into a single cohesive argument

Lines 282 and 286 - very short paragraphs. Should be rewritten

The different models are well outlined and presented

The results are not thorough. There is no text in the result section and the statistics are very limited. Relying on RMSE and R2 alone is not sufficient. You should also look at %RMSE and standard error. An R2 and RMSE gives you a limited understanding of how well the models performed.

The results are in discussion section but it would be preferable to describe these in the results section. The discussion should discuss these results and place them in context of the existing literature and current body of knowledge. Here you need to confirm that this work has advanced the field. The discussion should also discuss why you are getting the results you have - what drives the performance and error

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Dimitris Poursanidis

Reviewer #2: No

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Study of Various Machine Learning Approaches for Sentinel-2 Derived Bathymetry

PONE-D-22-20317R1

Dear Dr. Chybicki,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Bhogendra Mishra

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Following a careful review of the feedback provided by the reviewers, it is my recommendation that the authors engage in a thorough revision of the manuscript to address concerns related to its structure, language, and analysis. 

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Dear Authors

The manuscript has been improved based on the previous suggestions.

The provision of the developed code as docker is good for the reuse by any interested.

Next steo could be a GUI for real easy use.

Best regards

D.

Reviewer #3: The authors considered all comments.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Dimitris Poursanidis

Reviewer #3: No

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