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Tornado Forecasting with Multiple Markov Boundaries

Published: 10 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Reliable tornado forecasting with a long-lead time can greatly support emergency response and is of vital importance for the economy and society. The large number of meteorological variables in spatiotemporal domains and the complex relationships among variables remain the top difficulties for a long-lead tornado forecasting.
Standard data mining approaches to tackle high dimensionality are usually designed to discover a single set of features without alternating options for domain scientists to select more reliable and physical interpretable variables.
In this work, we provide a new solution to use the concept of multiple Markov boundaries in local causal discovery to identify multiple sets of the precursors for tornado forecasting. Specifically, our algorithm first confines the extremely large feature spaces to a small core feature space, then it mines multiple sets of the precursors from the core feature space that may equally contribute to tornado forecasting. With the multiple sets of the precursors, we are able to report to domain scientists the predictive but practical set of precursors.
An extensive empirical study is conducted on eight benchmark data sets and the historical tornado data near Oklahoma City, OK in the United States. Experimental results show that the tornado precursors we identified can help to improve the reliability of long-lead time catastrophic tornado forecasting.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    KDD '15: Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
    August 2015
    2378 pages
    ISBN:9781450336642
    DOI:10.1145/2783258
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 August 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. core feature space
    2. distributed feature data
    3. multiple markov boundaries
    4. tornado forecasting

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    Funding Sources

    • National 973 Program of China
    • The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences Canada
    • National Natural Science Foundation of China
    • NSERC
    • TBCIC NRAS
    • PCSIRT, Ministry of Education, China

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    KDD '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 160 of 819 submissions, 20%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,133 of 8,635 submissions, 13%

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