Dynamical systems-inspired machine learning methods for drought prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drought is a naturally occurring phenomenon that affects millions of people and results in billions of dollars in damages each year, with impacts expected to worsen due to climate change. At the same time, definitions of drought are nebulous, and extant quantitative drought indicators suffer from short prediction horizons. One such indicator is the Normalized Vegetation Difference Index (NDVI), which measures photosynthetic activity, making it a strong proxy for vegetation density. Recent studies have identified chaotic attractors in satellite-derived NDVI time-series, suggesting a dynamical systems framework may be helpful for time-series prediction of NDVI. In this study, we compare the performance of a mechanistic model and two physics-informed machine learning methods (Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics [SINDy] and reservoir computing) on the prediction of NDVI time-series data in drought-prone regions of Kenya. We find that SINDy, a sparse polynomial modelling architecture, narrowly outperforms the other two methods with the use of precipitation data, while also retaining some of the interpretability of the mechanistic model. We also find that none of the methods perform as well in the regions in which the chaotic NDVI attractors were originally identified. We conclude by proposing more sophisticated extensions to the methods presented here, both with and without the availability of precipitation data, that draw on the existing dynamical systems and machine learning literature to enable better quantitative predictions of key drought indicators. • Interest in applications of data-driven dynamical systems is growing. • These methods could be applied to time series of vegetation data. • We compare three methods for prediction of Normalized Vegetation Difference Index (NDVI) data. • Continued development of this approach could improve drought prediction.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".