A Machine Learning Metasystem for Robust Probabilistic Nonlinear Regression-Based Forecasting of Seasonal Water Availability in the US West
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hydroelectric power generation, water supplies for municipal, agricultural, manufacturing, and service industry uses including technology-sector requirements, dam safety, flood control, recreational uses, and ecological and legal constraints, all place simultaneous, competing demands on the heavily stressed water management infrastructure of the mostly arid American West. Optimally managing these resources depends on predicting water availability. We built a probabilistic nonlinear regression water supply forecast (WSF) technique for the US Department of Agriculture, which runs the largest stand-alone WSF system in the US West. Design criteria included improved accuracy over the existing system; uncertainty estimates that seamlessly handle complex (heteroscedastic, non-Gaussian) prediction errors; integration of physical hydrometeorological process knowledge and domain-specific expert experience; ability to accommodate nonlinearity, model selection uncertainty and equifinality, and predictor multicollinearity and high dimensionality; and relatively easy, low-cost implementation. Some methods satisfied some of these requirements but none met all, leading us to develop a novel, interdisciplinary, and pragmatic prediction metasystem through a carefully considered synthesis of well-established, off-the-shelf components and approaches, spanning supervised and unsupervised machine learning, nonparametric statistical modeling, ensemble learning, and evolutionary optimization, focusing on maintaining but radically updating the principal components regression framework widely used for WSF. Testing this integrated multi-method prediction engine demonstrated its value for river forecasting; USDA adoption is a landmark for transitioning machine learning from research into practice in this field. Its ability to handle all the foregoing design criteria and requirements, which are not unique to WSF, suggests potential for extension to complex probabilistic prediction problems in other fields.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".