Learning from Polar Representation: An Extreme-Adaptive Model for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

In the hydrology field, time series forecasting is crucial for efficient water resource management, improving flood and drought control and increasing the safety and quality of life for the general population. However, predicting long-term streamflow is a complex task due to the presence of extreme events. It requires the capture of long-range dependencies and the modeling of rare but important extreme values. Existing approaches often struggle to tackle these dual challenges simultaneously. In this paper, we specifically delve into these issues and propose Distance-weighted Auto-regularized Neural network (DAN), a novel extreme-adaptive model for long-range forecasting of stremflow enhanced by polar representation learning. DAN utilizes a distance-weighted multi-loss mechanism and stackable blocks to dynamically refine indicator sequences from exogenous data, while also being able to handle uni-variate time-series by employing Gaussian Mixture probability modeling to improve robustness to severe events. We also introduce Kruskal-Wallis sampling and gate control vectors to handle imbalanced extreme data. On four real-life hydrologic streamflow datasets, we demonstrate that DAN significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art hydrologic time series prediction methods and general methods designed for long-term time series prediction.

Fast and Interpretable Mortality Risk Scores for Critical Care Patients

Prediction of mortality in intensive care unit (ICU) patients is an important task in critical care medicine. Prior work in creating mortality risk models falls into two major categories: domain-expert-created scoring systems, and black box machine learning (ML) models. Both of these have disadvantages: black box models are unacceptable for use in hospitals, whereas manual creation of models (including hand-tuning of logistic regression parameters) relies on humans to perform high-dimensional constrained optimization, which leads to a loss in performance. In this work, we bridge the gap between accurate black box models and hand-tuned interpretable models. We build on modern interpretable ML techniques to design accurate and interpretable mortality risk scores. We leverage the largest existing public ICU monitoring datasets, namely the MIMIC III and eICU datasets. By evaluating risk across medical centers, we are able to study generalization across domains. In order to customize our risk score models, we develop a new algorithm, GroupFasterRisk, which has several important benefits: (1) it uses hard sparsity constraint, allowing users to directly control the number of features; (2) it incorporates group sparsity to allow more cohesive models; (3) it allows for monotonicity correction on models for including domain knowledge; (4) it produces many equally-good models at once, which allows domain experts to choose among them. GroupFasterRisk creates its risk scores within hours, even on the large datasets we study here. GroupFasterRisk's risk scores perform better than risk scores currently used in hospitals, and have similar prediction performance to black box ML models (despite being much sparser). Because GroupFasterRisk produces a variety of risk scores and handles constraints, it allows design flexibility, which is the key enabler of practical and trustworthy model creation.

An Extreme-Adaptive Time Series Prediction Model Based on Probability-Enhanced LSTM Neural Networks

Forecasting time series with extreme events has been a challenging and prevalent research topic, especially when the time series data are affected by complicated uncertain factors, such as is the case in hydrologic prediction. Diverse traditional and deep learning models have been applied to discover the nonlinear relationships and recognize the complex patterns in these types of data. However, existing methods usually ignore the negative influence of imbalanced data, or severe events, on model training. Moreover, methods are usually evaluated on a small number of generally well-behaved time series, which does not show their ability to generalize. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel probability-enhanced neural network model, called NEC+, which concurrently learns extreme and normal prediction functions and a way to choose among them via selective back propagation. We evaluate the proposed model on the difficult 3-day ahead hourly water level prediction task applied to 9 reservoirs in California. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits superior generalization ability on data with diverse distributions.