Title
Latent State Inference in a Spatiotemporal Generative Model
Abstract
Knowledge about the hidden factors that determine particular system dynamics is crucial for both explaining them and pursuing goal-directed interventions. Inferring these factors from time series data without supervision remains an open challenge. Here, we focus on spatiotemporal processes, including wave propagation and weather dynamics, for which we assume that universal causes (e.g. physics) apply throughout space and time. A recently introduced DIstributed SpatioTemporal graph Artificial Neural network Architecture (DISTANA) is used and enhanced to learn such processes, requiring fewer parameters and achieving significantly more accurate predictions compared to temporal convolutional neural networks and other related approaches. We show that DISTANA, when combined with a retrospective latent state inference principle called active tuning, can reliably derive location-respective hidden causal factors. In a current weather prediction benchmark, DISTANA infers our planet's land-sea mask solely by observing temperature dynamics and, meanwhile, uses the self inferred information to improve its own future temperature predictions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/978-3-030-86380-7_31
ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS AND MACHINE LEARNING - ICANN 2021, PT IV
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Recurrent neural networks, Graph neural networks, Latent inference, Weather prediction
Conference
12894
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matthias Karlbauer101.01
Tobias Menge200.34
Sebastian Otte34712.57
Hendrik P. A. Lensch4147196.59
Thomas Scholten500.34
volker wulfmeyer602.37
Martin V. Butz723.45