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arXiv · 2109.06429

Robust Inverse Framework using Knowledge-guided Self-Supervised Learning: An application to Hydrology

Rahul Ghosh·Arvind Renganathan·Kshitij Tayal·Xiang Li·Ankush Khandelwal·Xiaowei Jia·Chris Duffy·John Neiber·Vipin Kumar
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Abstract

Machine Learning is beginning to provide state-of-the-art performance in a range of environmental applications such as streamflow prediction in a hydrologic basin. However, building accurate broad-scale models for streamflow remains challenging in practice due to the variability in the dominant hydrologic processes, which are best captured by sets of process-related basin characteristics. Existing basin characteristics suffer from noise and uncertainty, among many other things, which adversely impact model performance. To tackle the above challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-guided Self-Supervised Learning (KGSSL) inverse framework to extract system characteristics from driver and response data. This first-of-its-kind framework achieves robust performance even when characteristics are corrupted. We show that KGSSL achieves state-of-the-art results for streamflow modeling for CAMELS (Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large-sample Studies) which is a widely used hydrology benchmark dataset. Specifically, KGSSL outperforms other methods by up to 16 \% in reconstructing characteristics. Furthermore, we show that KGSSL is relatively more robust to distortion than baseline methods, and outperforms the baseline model by 35\% when plugging in KGSSL inferred characteristics.

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Rahul Ghosh, Arvind Renganathan, Kshitij Tayal, Xiang Li, Ankush Khandelwal, Xiaowei Jia, Chris Duffy, John Neiber, Vipin Kumar. 2021-09-14. Robust Inverse Framework using Knowledge-guided Self-Supervised Learning: An application to Hydrology. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06429

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