Regression modelling of spatiotemporal extreme U.S. wildfires via partially-interpretable neural networks
Type
PreprintAuthors
Richards, Jordan
Huser, Raphaël

KAUST Department
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) DivisionStatistics Program
KAUST Grant Number
OSR-CRG2020-4394Date
2022-12-13Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/680462
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Risk management in many environmental settings requires an understanding of the mechanisms that drive extreme events. Useful metrics for quantifying such risk are extreme quantiles of response variables conditioned on predictor variables that describe, e.g., climate, biosphere and environmental states. Typically these quantiles lie outside the range of observable data and so, for estimation, require specification of parametric extreme value models within a regression framework. Classical approaches in this context utilise linear or additive relationships between predictor and response variables and suffer in either their predictive capabilities or computational efficiency; moreover, their simplicity is unlikely to capture the truly complex structures that lead to the creation of extreme wildfires. In this paper, we propose a new methodological framework for performing extreme quantile regression using artificial neutral networks, which are able to capture complex non-linear relationships and scale well to high-dimensional data. The ``black box" nature of neural networks means that they lack the desirable trait of interpretability often favoured by practitioners; thus, we unify linear, and additive, regression methodology with deep learning to create partially-interpretable neural networks that can be used for statistical inference but retain high prediction accuracy. To complement this methodology, we further propose a novel point process model for extreme values which overcomes the finite lower-endpoint problem associated with the generalised extreme value class of distributions. Efficacy of our unified framework is illustrated on U.S. wildfire data with a high-dimensional predictor set and we illustrate vast improvements in predictive performance over linear and spline-based regression techniques.Sponsors
The authors would like to thank Thomas Opitz for providing the data and Michael O’Malley of Lancaster University, UK, for supportive discussions. The research reported in this publication was supported by funding from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) under Award No. OSR-CRG2020-4394. Support from the KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory is gratefully acknowledged.Publisher
arXivarXiv
2208.07581Additional Links
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.07581.pdfRelations
Is Supplemented By:- [Software]
Title: Jbrich95/pinnEV: Partially-Interpretable Neural Networks for Extreme Value modelling. Publication Date: 2022-04-12. github: Jbrich95/pinnEV Handle: 10754/680482