Evaluating aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties of time series deep learning models for soil moisture predictions (Research Track) Spotlight
Chaopeng Shen (Pennsylvania State University)
Abstract
Soil moisture is an important variable that determines floods, vegetation health, agriculture productivity, and land surface feedbacks to the atmosphere, etc.. The recently available satellite-based observations give us a unique opportunity to directly build data-driven models to predict soil moisture instead of using land surface models, but previously there was no uncertainty estimate. We tested Monte Carlo dropout with an aleatoric term (MCD+A) for our long short-term memory models for this problem, and ask if the uncertainty terms behave as they were argued to. We show that MCD+A indeed gave a good estimate of our predictive error, provided we tune a hyperparameter and use a representative training dataset. The aleatoric term responded strongly to observational noise and the epistemic term clearly acted as a detector for physiographic dissimilarity from the training data. However, when the training and test data are characteristically different, the aleatoric term could be misled, undermining its reliability. We will also discuss some of the major challenges for which we anticipate the geoscientific communities will need help from computer scientists in applying AI to climate or hydrologic modeling.