Spatio-temporal prediction of missing temperature with stochastic Poisson equations

The LC2019 team winning entry for the EVA 2019 data competition

Journal Article (2020)
Author(s)

Dan Cheng (TU Delft - Applied Probability)

Zishun Liu (TU Delft - Materials and Manufacturing)

Research Group
Materials and Manufacturing
Copyright
© 2020 D. Cheng, Z. Liu
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10687-020-00397-w
More Info
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Publication Year
2020
Language
English
Copyright
© 2020 D. Cheng, Z. Liu
Research Group
Materials and Manufacturing
Issue number
1
Volume number
24
Pages (from-to)
163-175
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Abstract

This paper presents our winning entry for the EVA 2019 data competition, the aim of which is to predict Red Sea surface temperature extremes over space and time. To achieve this, we used a stochastic partial differential equation (Poisson equation) based method, improved through a regularization to penalize large magnitudes of solutions. This approach is shown to be successful according to the competition’s evaluation criterion, i.e. a threshold-weighted continuous ranked probability score. Our stochastic Poisson equation and its boundary conditions resolve the data’s non-stationarity naturally and effectively. Meanwhile, our numerical method is computationally efficient at dealing with the data’s high dimensionality, without any parameter estimation. It demonstrates the usefulness of stochastic differential equations on spatio-temporal predictions, including the extremes of the process.