Spatio-temporal prediction of missing temperature with stochastic Poisson equations: The LC2019 team winning entry for the EVA 2019 data competition

Cheng, D.; Liu, Z.

doi:10.1007/s10687-020-00397-w

Spatio-temporal prediction of missing temperature with stochastic Poisson equations

Title

Spatio-temporal prediction of missing temperature with stochastic Poisson equations: The LC2019 team winning entry for the EVA 2019 data competition

Author

Cheng, D. (TU Delft Applied Probability)
Liu, Z. (TU Delft Materials and Manufacturing)

Date

2020

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.

Subject

35Q62
62H11
62M30
62P12
Data competition
EVA 2019 Conference
Poisson equation
Prediction
Spatio-temporal data
Temperature data