YOLO based Ocean Eddy Localization with AWS SageMaker

Ocean eddies play a significant role both on the sea surface and beneath it, contributing to the sustainability of marine life dependent on oceanic behaviors. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate ocean eddies to monitor changes in the Earth, particularly in the oceans, and their impact on climate. This study aims to pinpoint ocean eddies using AWS cloud services, specifically SageMaker. The primary objective is to detect small-scale (<20km) ocean eddies from satellite remote images and assess the feasibility of utilizing SageMaker, which offers tools for deploying AI applications. Moreover, this research not only explores the deployment of cloud-based services for remote sensing of Earth data but also evaluates several YOLO (You Only Look Once) models using single and multi-GPU-based services in the cloud. Furthermore, this study underscores the potential of these services, their limitations, challenges related to deployment and resource management, and their user-riendliness for Earth science projects.

Causality for Earth Science -- A Review on Time-series and Spatiotemporal Causality Methods

This survey paper covers the breadth and depth of time-series and spatiotemporal causality methods, and their applications in Earth Science. More specifically, the paper presents an overview of causal discovery and causal inference, explains the underlying causal assumptions, and enlists evaluation techniques and key terminologies of the domain area. The paper elicits the various state-of-the-art methods introduced for time-series and spatiotemporal causal analysis along with their strengths and limitations. The paper further describes the existing applications of several methods for answering specific Earth Science questions such as extreme weather events, sea level rise, teleconnections etc. This survey paper can serve as a primer for Data Science researchers interested in data-driven causal study as we share a list of resources, such as Earth Science datasets (synthetic, simulated and observational data) and open source tools for causal analysis. It will equally benefit the Earth Science community interested in taking an AI-driven approach to study the causality of different dynamic and thermodynamic processes as we present the open challenges and opportunities in performing causality-based Earth Science study.

TS-CausalNN: Learning Temporal Causal Relations from Non-linear Non-stationary Time Series Data

The growing availability and importance of time series data across various domains, including environmental science, epidemiology, and economics, has led to an increasing need for time-series causal discovery methods that can identify the intricate relationships in the non-stationary, non-linear, and often noisy real world data. However, the majority of current time series causal discovery methods assume stationarity and linear relations in data, making them infeasible for the task. Further, the recent deep learning-based methods rely on the traditional causal structure learning approaches making them computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a Time-Series Causal Neural Network (TS-CausalNN) - a deep learning technique to discover contemporaneous and lagged causal relations simultaneously. Our proposed architecture comprises (i) convolutional blocks comprising parallel custom causal layers, (ii) acyclicity constraint, and (iii) optimization techniques using the augmented Lagrangian approach. In addition to the simple parallel design, an advantage of the proposed model is that it naturally handles the non-stationarity and non-linearity of the data. Through experiments on multiple synthetic and real world datasets, we demonstrate the empirical proficiency of our proposed approach as compared to several state-of-the-art methods. The inferred graphs for the real world dataset are in good agreement with the domain understanding.

MT-HCCAR: Multi-Task Deep Learning with Hierarchical Classification and Attention-based Regression for Cloud Property Retrieval

In the realm of Earth science, effective cloud property retrieval, encompassing cloud masking, cloud phase classification, and cloud optical thickness (COT) prediction, remains pivotal. Traditional methodologies necessitate distinct models for each sensor instrument due to their unique spectral characteristics. Recent strides in Earth Science research have embraced machine learning and deep learning techniques to extract features from satellite datasets' spectral observations. However, prevailing approaches lack novel architectures accounting for hierarchical relationships among retrieval tasks. Moreover, considering the spectral diversity among existing sensors, the development of models with robust generalization capabilities over different sensor datasets is imperative. Surprisingly, there is a dearth of methodologies addressing the selection of an optimal model for diverse datasets. In response, this paper introduces MT-HCCAR, an end-to-end deep learning model employing multi-task learning to simultaneously tackle cloud masking, cloud phase retrieval (classification tasks), and COT prediction (a regression task). The MT-HCCAR integrates a hierarchical classification network (HC) and a classification-assisted attention-based regression network (CAR), enhancing precision and robustness in cloud labeling and COT prediction. Additionally, a comprehensive model selection method rooted in K-fold cross-validation, one standard error rule, and two introduced performance scores is proposed to select the optimal model over three simulated satellite datasets OCI, VIIRS, and ABI. The experiments comparing MT-HCCAR with baseline methods, the ablation studies, and the model selection affirm the superiority and the generalization capabilities of MT-HCCAR.

Multi-graph Spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Prediction

Inter-city highway transportation is significant for urban life. As one of the key functions in intelligent transportation system (ITS), traffic evaluation always plays significant role nowadays, and daily traffic flow prediction still faces challenges at network-wide toll stations. On the one hand, the data imbalance in practice among various locations deteriorates the performance of prediction. On the other hand, complex correlative spatio-temporal factors cannot be comprehensively employed in long-term duration. In this paper, a prediction method is proposed for daily traffic flow in highway domain through spatio-temporal deep learning. In our method, data normalization strategy is used to deal with data imbalance, due to long-tail distribution of traffic flow at network-wide toll stations. And then, based on graph convolutional network, we construct networks in distinct semantics to capture spatio-temporal features. Beside that, meteorology and calendar features are used by our model in the full connection stage to extra external characteristics of traffic flow. By extensive experiments and case studies in one Chinese provincial highway, our method shows clear improvement in predictive accuracy than baselines and practical benefits in business.

MT-IceNet -- A Spatial and Multi-Temporal Deep Learning Model for Arctic Sea Ice Forecasting

Arctic amplification has altered the climate patterns both regionally and globally, resulting in more frequent and more intense extreme weather events in the past few decades. The essential part of Arctic amplification is the unprecedented sea ice loss as demonstrated by satellite observations. Accurately forecasting Arctic sea ice from sub-seasonal to seasonal scales has been a major research question with fundamental challenges at play. In addition to physics-based Earth system models, researchers have been applying multiple statistical and machine learning models for sea ice forecasting. Looking at the potential of data-driven approaches to study sea ice variations, we propose MT-IceNet - a UNet based spatial and multi-temporal (MT) deep learning model for forecasting Arctic sea ice concentration (SIC). The model uses an encoder-decoder architecture with skip connections and processes multi-temporal input streams to regenerate spatial maps at future timesteps. Using bi-monthly and monthly satellite retrieved sea ice data from NSIDC as well as atmospheric and oceanic variables from ERA5 reanalysis product during 1979-2021, we show that our proposed model provides promising predictive performance for per-pixel SIC forecasting with up to 60% decrease in prediction error for a lead time of 6 months as compared to its state-of-the-art counterparts.

Deep Spatiotemporal Clustering: A Temporal Clustering Approach for Multi-dimensional Climate Data

Clustering high-dimensional spatiotemporal data using an unsupervised approach is a challenging problem for many data-driven applications. Existing state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised clustering use different similarity and distance functions but focus on either spatial or temporal features of the data. Concentrating on joint deep representation learning of spatial and temporal features, we propose Deep Spatiotemporal Clustering (DSC), a novel algorithm for the temporal clustering of high-dimensional spatiotemporal data using an unsupervised deep learning method. Inspired by the U-net architecture, DSC utilizes an autoencoder integrating CNN-RNN layers to learn latent representations of the spatiotemporal data. DSC also includes a unique layer for cluster assignment on latent representations that uses the Student's t-distribution. By optimizing the clustering loss and data reconstruction loss simultaneously, the algorithm gradually improves clustering assignments and the nonlinear mapping between low-dimensional latent feature space and high-dimensional original data space. A multivariate spatiotemporal climate dataset is used to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method. Our extensive experiments show our approach outperforms both conventional and deep learning-based unsupervised clustering algorithms. Additionally, we compared the proposed model with its various variants (CNN encoder, CNN autoencoder, CNN-RNN encoder, CNN-RNN autoencoder, etc.) to get insight into using both the CNN and RNN layers in the autoencoder, and our proposed technique outperforms these variants in terms of clustering results.

Quantifying Causes of Arctic Amplification via Deep Learning based Time-series Causal Inference

The warming of the Arctic, also known as Arctic amplification, is led by several atmospheric and oceanic drivers, however, the details of its underlying thermodynamic causes are still unknown. Inferring the causal effects of atmospheric processes on sea ice melt using fixed treatment effect strategies leads to unrealistic counterfactual estimations. Such models are also prone to bias due to time-varying confoundedness. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose TCINet - time-series causal inference model to infer causation under continuous treatment using recurrent neural networks. Through experiments on synthetic and observational data, we show how our research can substantially improve the ability to quantify the leading causes of Arctic sea ice melt.

Towards Fair Machine Learning Software: Understanding and Addressing Model Bias Through Counterfactual Thinking

The increasing use of Machine Learning (ML) software can lead to unfair and unethical decisions, thus fairness bugs in software are becoming a growing concern. Addressing these fairness bugs often involves sacrificing ML performance, such as accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel counterfactual approach that uses counterfactual thinking to tackle the root causes of bias in ML software. In addition, our approach combines models optimized for both performance and fairness, resulting in an optimal solution in both aspects. We conducted a thorough evaluation of our approach on 10 benchmark tasks using a combination of 5 performance metrics, 3 fairness metrics, and 15 measurement scenarios, all applied to 8 real-world datasets. The conducted extensive evaluations show that the proposed method significantly improves the fairness of ML software while maintaining competitive performance, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions in 84.6% of overall cases based on a recent benchmarking tool.

An Edge-Cloud Integrated Framework for Flexible and Dynamic Stream Analytics

With the popularity of Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing and cloud computing, more and more stream analytics applications are being developed including real-time trend prediction and object detection on top of IoT sensing data. One popular type of stream analytics is the recurrent neural network (RNN) deep learning model based time series or sequence data prediction and forecasting. Different from traditional analytics that assumes data to be processed are available ahead of time and will not change, stream analytics deals with data that are being generated continuously and data trend/distribution could change (aka concept drift), which will cause prediction/forecasting accuracy to drop over time. One other challenge is to find the best resource provisioning for stream analytics to achieve good overall latency. In this paper, we study how to best leverage edge and cloud resources to achieve better accuracy and latency for RNN-based stream analytics. We propose a novel edge-cloud integrated framework for hybrid stream analytics that support low latency inference on the edge and high capacity training on the cloud. We study the flexible deployment of our hybrid learning framework, namely edge-centric, cloud-centric and edge-cloud integrated. Further, our hybrid learning framework can dynamically combine inference results from an RNN model pre-trained based on historical data and another RNN model re-trained periodically based on the most recent data. Using real-world and simulated stream datasets, our experiments show the proposed edge-cloud deployment is the best among all three deployment types in terms of latency. For accuracy, the experiments show our dynamic learning approach performs the best among all learning approaches for all three concept drift scenarios.