DSAF: A Dual-Stage Adaptive Framework for Numerical Weather Prediction Downscaling

While widely recognized as one of the most substantial weather forecasting methodologies, Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) usually suffers from relatively coarse resolution and inevitable bias due to tempo-spatial discretization, physical parametrization process, and computation limitation. With the roaring growth of deep learning-based techniques, we propose the Dual-Stage Adaptive Framework (DSAF), a novel framework to address regional NWP downscaling and bias correction tasks. DSAF uniquely incorporates adaptive elements in its design to ensure a flexible response to evolving weather conditions. Specifically, NWP downscaling and correction are well-decoupled in the framework and can be applied independently, which strategically guides the optimization trajectory of the model. Utilizing a multi-task learning mechanism and an uncertainty-weighted loss function, DSAF facilitates balanced training across various weather factors. Additionally, our specifically designed attention-centric learnable module effectively integrates geographic information, proficiently managing complex interrelationships. Experimental validation on the ECMWF operational forecast (HRES) and reanalysis (ERA5) archive demonstrates DSAF's superior performance over existing state-of-the-art models and shows substantial improvements when existing models are augmented using our proposed modules. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/pengwei07/DSAF.

WeatherGNN: Exploiting Complicated Relationships in Numerical Weather Prediction Bias Correction

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) may be inaccurate or biased due to incomplete atmospheric physical processes, insufficient spatial-temporal resolution, and inherent uncertainty of weather. Previous studies have attempted to correct biases by using handcrafted features and domain knowledge, or by applying general machine learning models naively. They do not fully explore the complicated meteorologic interactions and spatial dependencies in the atmosphere dynamically, which limits their applicability in NWP bias-correction. Specifically, weather factors interact with each other in complex ways, and these interactions can vary regionally. In addition, the interactions between weather factors are further complicated by the spatial dependencies between regions, which are influenced by varied terrain and atmospheric motions. To address these issues, we propose WeatherGNN, an NWP bias-correction method that utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to learn meteorologic and geographic relationships in a unified framework. Our approach includes a factor-wise GNN that captures meteorological interactions within each grid (a specific location) adaptively, and a fast hierarchical GNN that captures spatial dependencies between grids dynamically. Notably, the fast hierarchical GNN achieves linear complexity with respect to the number of grids, enhancing model efficiency and scalability. Our experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of WeatherGNN in comparison with other SOTA methods, with an average improvement of 40.50\% on RMSE compared to the original NWP.

DSTCGCN: Learning Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Cross Dependencies for Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting is essential to intelligent transportation systems, which is challenging due to the complicated spatial and temporal dependencies within a road network. Existing works usually learn spatial and temporal dependencies separately, ignoring the dependencies crossing spatial and temporal dimensions. In this paper, we propose DSTCGCN, a dynamic spatial-temporal cross graph convolution network to learn dynamic spatial and temporal dependencies jointly via graphs for traffic forecasting. Specifically, we introduce a fast Fourier transform (FFT) based attentive selector to choose relevant time steps for each time step based on time-varying traffic data. Given the selected time steps, we introduce a dynamic cross graph construction module, consisting of the spatial graph construction, temporal connection graph construction, and fusion modules, to learn dynamic spatial-temporal cross dependencies without pre-defined priors. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that DSTCGCN achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Dynamic Adaptive and Adversarial Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting is challenging due to dynamic and complicated spatial-temporal dependencies. However, existing methods still suffer from two critical limitations. Firstly, many approaches typically utilize static pre-defined or adaptively learned spatial graphs to capture dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies in the traffic system, which limits the flexibility and only captures shared patterns for the whole time, thus leading to sub-optimal performance. In addition, most approaches individually and independently consider the absolute error between ground truth and predictions at each time step, which fails to maintain the global properties and statistics of time series as a whole and results in trend discrepancy between ground truth and predictions. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Dynamic Adaptive and Adversarial Graph Convolutional Network (DAAGCN), which combines Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for traffic forecasting. Specifically, DAAGCN leverages a universal paradigm with a gate module to integrate time-varying embeddings with node embeddings to generate dynamic adaptive graphs for inferring spatial-temporal dependencies at each time step. Then, two discriminators are designed to maintain the consistency of the global properties and statistics of predicted time series with ground truth at the sequence and graph levels. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets manifest that DAAGCN outperforms the state-of-the-art by average 5.05%, 3.80%, and 5.27%, in terms of MAE, RMSE, and MAPE, meanwhile, speeds up convergence up to 9 times. Code is available at https://github.com/juyongjiang/DAAGCN.

Learning from Multiple Time Series: A Deep Disentangled Approach to Diversified Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is a significant problem in many applications, e.g., financial predictions and business optimization. Modern datasets can have multiple correlated time series, which are often generated with global (shared) regularities and local (specific) dynamics. In this paper, we seek to tackle such forecasting problems with DeepDGL, a deep forecasting model that disentangles dynamics into global and local temporal patterns. DeepDGL employs an encoder-decoder architecture, consisting of two encoders to learn global and local temporal patterns, respectively, and a decoder to make multi-step forecasting. Specifically, to model complicated global patterns, the vector quantization (VQ) module is introduced, allowing the global feature encoder to learn a shared codebook among all time series. To model diversified and heterogenous local patterns, an adaptive parameter generation module enhanced by the contrastive multi-horizon coding (CMC) is proposed to generate the parameters of the local feature encoder for each individual time series, which maximizes the mutual information between the series-specific context variable and the long/short-term representations of the corresponding time series. Our experiments on several real-world datasets show that DeepDGL outperforms existing state-of-the-art models.

Group-Aware Graph Neural Network for Nationwide City Air Quality Forecasting

The problem of air pollution threatens public health. Air quality forecasting can provide the air quality index hours or even days later, which can help the public to prevent air pollution in advance. Previous works focus on citywide air quality forecasting and cannot solve nationwide city forecasting problem, whose difficulties lie in capturing the latent dependencies between geographically distant but highly correlated cities. In this paper, we propose the group-aware graph neural network (GAGNN), a hierarchical model for nationwide city air quality forecasting. The model constructs a city graph and a city group graph to model the spatial and latent dependencies between cities, respectively. GAGNN introduces differentiable grouping network to discover the latent dependencies among cities and generate city groups. Based on the generated city groups, a group correlation encoding module is introduced to learn the correlations between them, which can effectively capture the dependencies between city groups. After the graph construction, GAGNN implements message passing mechanism to model the dependencies between cities and city groups. The evaluation experiments on Chinese city air quality dataset indicate that our GAGNN outperforms existing forecasting models.