arXiv subjects

Cornelia Gruber

Publications and source records attributed to Cornelia Gruber.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Probabilistic Deep Learning for Drought Forecasting: Role of Internal Climate Variability

Predicting drought risk is essential for anticipating impacts on water resources, agriculture, ecosystems, and climate adaptation planning. Yet drought forecasts remain uncertain because variability can substantially alter regional precipitation and evaporative demand. Treating this variability as unstructured noise ignores the fact that internal variability has spatial, seasonal, and temporal structure and thus contains information that can be used to improve drought forecasting. We propose a deep-learning-based forecasting framework for European drought prediction and extend it with an uncertainty-aware drought bound that explicitly incorporates internal forecast variability from a large climate model ensemble. This bound represents a physically plausible lower-tail trajectory of future drought conditions and marks how severe drought could plausibly become under an unfavourable realisation of internal variability, giving adaptation planning a conservative, risk-averse reference. We compare the proposed bound with a lower bound derived from reanalysis data only and show that our proposed ensemble-informed bound is better calibrated across most regions and seasons. This is specifically true during anomalously dry conditions, when historical reanalysis alone underestimates lower-tail drought risk. Our results show that internal variability should be treated as a forecast quantity in its own right. More broadly, large ensembles provide a practical way to transfer physically plausible climate variability into machine-learning drought forecasts, yielding risk-aware bounds that are more informative for drought assessment under shifting climate conditions.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

Capturing Aleatoric Uncertainty in Climate Models

Internal climate variability arises from the climate system's inherently chaotic dynamics. Quantifying it is essential for climate science, as it enables risk-based decision-making and differentiates between externally forced change and internal fluctuations. In statistical terms, natural variability corresponds to aleatoric uncertainty, i.e., irreducible stochastic variability. Despite this close conceptual alignment, the link between internal climate variability and aleatoric uncertainty has not yet been formalized. We establish a theoretical link by showing that member-to-member differences in single-model large ensembles provide a direct representation of aleatoric uncertainty. To quantify the spatio-temporal structure of aleatoric uncertainty, we employ generalized additive models. The proposed framework is validated through comparison with ERA5-Land reanalysis data, demonstrating that ensemble-derived estimates reproduce key spatial and temporal patterns of real-world variability. Applied to the water balance over the Iberian Peninsula, our approach reveals coherent variability structures and pronounced regional heterogeneity. We find a decline in variability in drought-prone regions and seasons, a pattern that strengthens under +3 {\deg}C global warming, implying an increased risk of persistent summer drought conditions. Beyond this application, the framework is climate-model agnostic and transferable to other variables and spatial scales, providing a statistical basis for quantifying internal climate variability as aleatoric uncertainty.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2025

Revisiting Active Learning under (Human) Label Variation

Access to high-quality labeled data remains a limiting factor in applied supervised learning. While label variation (LV), i.e., differing labels for the same instance, is common, especially in natural language processing, annotation frameworks often still rest on the assumption of a single ground truth. This overlooks human label variation (HLV), the occurrence of plausible differences in annotations, as an informative signal. Similarly, active learning (AL), a popular approach to optimizing the use of limited annotation budgets in training ML models, often relies on at least one of several simplifying assumptions, which rarely hold in practice when acknowledging HLV. In this paper, we examine foundational assumptions about truth and label nature, highlighting the need to decompose observed LV into signal (e.g., HLV) and noise (e.g., annotation error). We survey how the AL and (H)LV communities have addressed -- or neglected -- these distinctions and propose a conceptual framework for incorporating HLV throughout the AL loop, including instance selection, annotator choice, and label representation. We further discuss the integration of large language models (LLM) as annotators. Our work aims to lay a conceptual foundation for HLV-aware active learning, better reflecting the complexities of real-world annotation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Sources of Uncertainty in Supervised Machine Learning -- A Statisticians' View

Supervised machine learning and predictive models have achieved an impressive standard today, enabling us to answer questions that were inconceivable a few years ago. Besides these successes, it becomes clear, that beyond pure prediction, which is the primary strength of most supervised machine learning algorithms, the quantification of uncertainty is relevant and necessary as well. However, before quantification is possible, types and sources of uncertainty need to be defined precisely. While first concepts and ideas in this direction have emerged in recent years, this paper adopts a conceptual, basic science perspective and examines possible sources of uncertainty. By adopting the viewpoint of a statistician, we discuss the concepts of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty, which are more commonly associated with machine learning. The paper aims to formalize the two types of uncertainty and demonstrates that sources of uncertainty are miscellaneous and can not always be decomposed into aleatoric and epistemic. Drawing parallels between statistical concepts and uncertainty in machine learning, we emphasise the role of data and their influence on uncertainty.

stat.ML↗