Muscat: Multi-scale spatio-temporal learning with application to climate modeling

Abstract

In climate and environmental sciences, vast amount of spatio-temporal data have been generated at varying spatial resolutions from satellite observations and computer models. Integrating such diverse sources of data has proven to be useful for building prediction models as the multi-scale data may capture different aspects of the Earth system. In this paper, we present a novel framework called Muscat for predictive modeling of multi-scale, spatio-temporal data. Muscat performs a joint decomposition of multiple tensors from different spatial scales, taking into account the relationships between the variables. The latent factors derived from the joint tensor decomposition are used to train the spatial and temporal prediction models at different scales for each location. The outputs from these ensemble of spatial and temporal models will be aggregated to generate future predictions. An incremental learning algorithm is also proposed to handle the massive size of the tensors. Experimental results on real-world data from the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN) showed that Muscat outperformed other competing methods in more than 70% of the locations.