skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: A Machine Learning Tutorial for Operational Meteorology, Part II: Neural Networks and Deep Learning
Abstract Over the past decade the use of machine learning in meteorology has grown rapidly. Specifically neural networks and deep learning have been used at an unprecedented rate. In order to fill the dearth of resources covering neural networks with a meteorological lens, this paper discusses machine learning methods in a plain language format that is targeted for the operational meteorological community. This is the second paper in a pair that aim to serve as a machine learning resource for meteorologists. While the first paper focused on traditional machine learning methods (e.g., random forest), here a broad spectrum of neural networks and deep learning methods are discussed. Specifically this paper covers perceptrons, artificial neural networks, convolutional neural networks and U-networks. Like the part 1 paper, this manuscript discusses the terms associated with neural networks and their training. Then the manuscript provides some intuition behind every method and concludes by showing each method used in a meteorological example of diagnosing thunderstorms from satellite images (e.g., lightning flashes). This paper is accompanied with an open-source code repository to allow readers to explore neural networks using either the dataset provided (which is used in the paper) or as a template for alternate datasets.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2019758
PAR ID:
10422669
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Weather and Forecasting
ISSN:
0882-8156
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. An efficient feature selection method can significantly boost results in classification problems. Despite ongoing improvement, hand-designed methods often fail to extract features capturing high- and mid-level representations at effective levels. In machine learning (Deep Learning), recent developments have improved upon these hand-designed methods by utilizing automatic extraction of features. Specifically, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a highly successful technique for image classification which can automatically extract features, with ongoing learning and classification of these features. The purpose of this study is to detect hydraulic structures (i.e., bridges and culverts) that are important to overland flow modeling and environmental applications. The dataset used in this work is a relatively small dataset derived from 1-m LiDAR-derived Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) and National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) aerial imagery. The classes for our experiment consist of two groups: the ones with a bridge/culvert being present are considered "True", and those without a bridge/culvert are considered "False". In this paper, we use advanced CNN techniques, including Siamese Neural Networks (SNNs), Capsule Networks (CapsNets), and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), to classify samples with similar topographic and spectral characteristics, an objective which is challenging utilizing traditional machine learning techniques, such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Gaussian Classifier (GC), and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). The advanced CNN-based approaches combined with data pre-processing techniques (e.g., data augmenting) produced superior results. These approaches provide efficient, cost-effective, and innovative solutions to the identification of hydraulic structures. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    With the recent advancement of deep learning, molecular representation learning -- automating the discovery of feature representation of molecular structure, has attracted significant attention from both chemists and machine learning researchers. Deep learning can facilitate a variety of downstream applications, including bio-property prediction, chemical reaction prediction, etc. Despite the fact that current SMILES string or molecular graph molecular representation learning algorithms (via sequence modeling and graph neural networks, respectively) have achieved promising results, there is no work to integrate the capabilities of both approaches in preserving molecular characteristics (e.g, atomic cluster, chemical bond) for further improvement. In this paper, we propose GraSeq, a joint graph and sequence representation learning model for molecular property prediction. Specifically, GraSeq makes a complementary combination of graph neural networks and recurrent neural networks for modeling two types of molecular inputs, respectively. In addition, it is trained by the multitask loss of unsupervised reconstruction and various downstream tasks, using limited size of labeled datasets. In a variety of chemical property prediction tests, we demonstrate that our GraSeq model achieves better performance than state-of-the-art approaches. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    Abstract The method of neural networks (aka deep learning) has opened up many new opportunities to utilize remotely sensed images in meteorology. Common applications include image classification, e.g., to determine whether an image contains a tropical cyclone, and image-to-image translation, e.g., to emulate radar imagery for satellites that only have passive channels. However, there are yet many open questions regarding the use of neural networks for working with meteorological images, such as best practices for evaluation, tuning, and interpretation. This article highlights several strategies and practical considerations for neural network development that have not yet received much attention in the meteorological community, such as the concept of receptive fields, underutilized meteorological performance measures, and methods for neural network interpretation, such as synthetic experiments and layer-wise relevance propagation. We also consider the process of neural network interpretation as a whole, recognizing it as an iterative meteorologist-driven discovery process that builds on experimental design and hypothesis generation and testing. Finally, while most work on neural network interpretation in meteorology has so far focused on networks for image classification tasks, we expand the focus to also include networks for image-to-image translation. 
    more » « less
  4. The ever-growing demand for accurate machine learning models resulted in an increase in dataset and model sizes of deep neural networks. This paper discusses reconfigurable optical networks as the key enabler for scaling AI systems. 
    more » « less
  5. Many sign languages are bona fide natural languages with grammatical rules and lexicons hence can benefit from machine translation methods. Similarly, since sign language is a visual-spatial language, it can also benefit from computer vision methods for encoding it. With the advent of deep learning methods in recent years, significant advances have been made in natural language processing (specifically neural machine translation) and in computer vision methods (specifically image and video captioning). Researchers have therefore begun expanding these learning methods to sign language understanding. Sign language interpretation is especially challenging, because it involves a continuous visual-spatial modality where meaning is often derived based on context. The focus of this article, therefore, is to examine various deep learning–based methods for encoding sign language as inputs, and to analyze the efficacy of several machine translation methods, over three different sign language datasets. The goal is to determine which combinations are sufficiently robust for sign language translation without any gloss-based information. To understand the role of the different input features, we perform ablation studies over the model architectures (input features + neural translation models) for improved continuous sign language translation. These input features include body and finger joints, facial points, as well as vector representations/embeddings from convolutional neural networks. The machine translation models explored include several baseline sequence-to-sequence approaches, more complex and challenging networks using attention, reinforcement learning, and the transformer model. We implement the translation methods over multiple sign languages—German (GSL), American (ASL), and Chinese sign languages (CSL). From our analysis, the transformer model combined with input embeddings from ResNet50 or pose-based landmark features outperformed all the other sequence-to-sequence models by achieving higher BLEU2-BLEU4 scores when applied to the controlled and constrained GSL benchmark dataset. These combinations also showed significant promise on the other less controlled ASL and CSL datasets. 
    more » « less