Tanujit Chakraborty

LG
h-index32
27papers
469citations
Novelty41%
AI Score52

27 Papers

LGSep 9, 2022
Knowledge-based Deep Learning for Modeling Chaotic Systems

Zakaria Elabid, Tanujit Chakraborty, Abdenour Hadid

Deep Learning has received increased attention due to its unbeatable success in many fields, such as computer vision, natural language processing, recommendation systems, and most recently in simulating multiphysics problems and predicting nonlinear dynamical systems. However, modeling and forecasting the dynamics of chaotic systems remains an open research problem since training deep learning models requires big data, which is not always available in many cases. Such deep learners can be trained from additional information obtained from simulated results and by enforcing the physical laws of the chaotic systems. This paper considers extreme events and their dynamics and proposes elegant models based on deep neural networks, called knowledge-based deep learning (KDL). Our proposed KDL can learn the complex patterns governing chaotic systems by jointly training on real and simulated data directly from the dynamics and their differential equations. This knowledge is transferred to model and forecast real-world chaotic events exhibiting extreme behavior. We validate the efficiency of our model by assessing it on three real-world benchmark datasets: El Nino sea surface temperature, San Juan Dengue viral infection, and Bjørnøya daily precipitation, all governed by extreme events' dynamics. Using prior knowledge of extreme events and physics-based loss functions to lead the neural network learning, we ensure physically consistent, generalizable, and accurate forecasting, even in a small data regime.

LGSep 8, 2022
W-Transformers : A Wavelet-based Transformer Framework for Univariate Time Series Forecasting

Lena Sasal, Tanujit Chakraborty, Abdenour Hadid

Deep learning utilizing transformers has recently achieved a lot of success in many vital areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, anomaly detection, and recommendation systems, among many others. Among several merits of transformers, the ability to capture long-range temporal dependencies and interactions is desirable for time series forecasting, leading to its progress in various time series applications. In this paper, we build a transformer model for non-stationary time series. The problem is challenging yet crucially important. We present a novel framework for univariate time series representation learning based on the wavelet-based transformer encoder architecture and call it W-Transformer. The proposed W-Transformers utilize a maximal overlap discrete wavelet transformation (MODWT) to the time series data and build local transformers on the decomposed datasets to vividly capture the nonstationarity and long-range nonlinear dependencies in the time series. Evaluating our framework on several publicly available benchmark time series datasets from various domains and with diverse characteristics, we demonstrate that it performs, on average, significantly better than the baseline forecasters for short-term and long-term forecasting, even for datasets that consist of only a few hundred training samples.

LGAug 30, 2023
Ten Years of Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs): A survey of the state-of-the-art

Tanujit Chakraborty, Ujjwal Reddy K S, Shraddha M. Naik et al.

Since their inception in 2014, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have rapidly emerged as powerful tools for generating realistic and diverse data across various domains, including computer vision and other applied areas. Consisting of a discriminative network and a generative network engaged in a Minimax game, GANs have revolutionized the field of generative modeling. In February 2018, GAN secured the leading spot on the ``Top Ten Global Breakthrough Technologies List'' issued by the Massachusetts Science and Technology Review. Over the years, numerous advancements have been proposed, leading to a rich array of GAN variants, such as conditional GAN, Wasserstein GAN, CycleGAN, and StyleGAN, among many others. This survey aims to provide a general overview of GANs, summarizing the latent architecture, validation metrics, and application areas of the most widely recognized variants. We also delve into recent theoretical developments, exploring the profound connection between the adversarial principle underlying GAN and Jensen-Shannon divergence, while discussing the optimality characteristics of the GAN framework. The efficiency of GAN variants and their model architectures will be evaluated along with training obstacles as well as training solutions. In addition, a detailed discussion will be provided, examining the integration of GANs with newly developed deep learning frameworks such as Transformers, Physics-Informed Neural Networks, Large Language models, and Diffusion models. Finally, we reveal several issues as well as future research outlines in this field.

MLApr 1, 2022
Probabilistic AutoRegressive Neural Networks for Accurate Long-range Forecasting

Madhurima Panja, Tanujit Chakraborty, Uttam Kumar et al.

Forecasting time series data is a critical area of research with applications spanning from stock prices to early epidemic prediction. While numerous statistical and machine learning methods have been proposed, real-life prediction problems often require hybrid solutions that bridge classical forecasting approaches and modern neural network models. In this study, we introduce the Probabilistic AutoRegressive Neural Networks (PARNN), capable of handling complex time series data exhibiting non-stationarity, nonlinearity, non-seasonality, long-range dependence, and chaotic patterns. PARNN is constructed by improving autoregressive neural networks (ARNN) using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) feedback error, combining the explainability, scalability, and "white-box-like" prediction behavior of both models. Notably, the PARNN model provides uncertainty quantification through prediction intervals, setting it apart from advanced deep learning tools. Through comprehensive computational experiments, we evaluate the performance of PARNN against standard statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models, including Transformers, NBeats, and DeepAR. Diverse real-world datasets from macroeconomics, tourism, epidemiology, and other domains are employed for short-term, medium-term, and long-term forecasting evaluations. Our results demonstrate the superiority of PARNN across various forecast horizons, surpassing the state-of-the-art forecasters. The proposed PARNN model offers a valuable hybrid solution for accurate long-range forecasting. By effectively capturing the complexities present in time series data, it outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and reliability. The ability to quantify uncertainty through prediction intervals further enhances the model's usefulness in decision-making processes.

PEDec 16, 2022
An ensemble neural network approach to forecast Dengue outbreak based on climatic condition

Madhurima Panja, Tanujit Chakraborty, Sk Shahid Nadim et al.

Dengue fever is a virulent disease spreading over 100 tropical and subtropical countries in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. This arboviral disease affects around 400 million people globally, severely distressing the healthcare systems. The unavailability of a specific drug and ready-to-use vaccine makes the situation worse. Hence, policymakers must rely on early warning systems to control intervention-related decisions. Forecasts routinely provide critical information for dangerous epidemic events. However, the available forecasting models (e.g., weather-driven mechanistic, statistical time series, and machine learning models) lack a clear understanding of different components to improve prediction accuracy and often provide unstable and unreliable forecasts. This study proposes an ensemble wavelet neural network with exogenous factor(s) (XEWNet) model that can produce reliable estimates for dengue outbreak prediction for three geographical regions, namely San Juan, Iquitos, and Ahmedabad. The proposed XEWNet model is flexible and can easily incorporate exogenous climate variable(s) confirmed by statistical causality tests in its scalable framework. The proposed model is an integrated approach that uses wavelet transformation into an ensemble neural network framework that helps in generating more reliable long-term forecasts. The proposed XEWNet allows complex non-linear relationships between the dengue incidence cases and rainfall; however, mathematically interpretable, fast in execution, and easily comprehensible. The proposal's competitiveness is measured using computational experiments based on various statistical metrics and several statistical comparison tests. In comparison with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods, our proposed XEWNet performs better in 75% of the cases for short-term and long-term forecasting of dengue incidence.

LGJun 21, 2022
Epicasting: An Ensemble Wavelet Neural Network (EWNet) for Forecasting Epidemics

Madhurima Panja, Tanujit Chakraborty, Uttam Kumar et al.

Infectious diseases remain among the top contributors to human illness and death worldwide, among which many diseases produce epidemic waves of infection. The unavailability of specific drugs and ready-to-use vaccines to prevent most of these epidemics makes the situation worse. These force public health officials and policymakers to rely on early warning systems generated by reliable and accurate forecasts of epidemics. Accurate forecasts of epidemics can assist stakeholders in tailoring countermeasures, such as vaccination campaigns, staff scheduling, and resource allocation, to the situation at hand, which could translate to reductions in the impact of a disease. Unfortunately, most of these past epidemics exhibit nonlinear and non-stationary characteristics due to their spreading fluctuations based on seasonal-dependent variability and the nature of these epidemics. We analyse a wide variety of epidemic time series datasets using a maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT) based autoregressive neural network and call it EWNet model. MODWT techniques effectively characterize non-stationary behavior and seasonal dependencies in the epidemic time series and improve the nonlinear forecasting scheme of the autoregressive neural network in the proposed ensemble wavelet network framework. From a nonlinear time series viewpoint, we explore the asymptotic stationarity of the proposed EWNet model to show the asymptotic behavior of the associated Markov Chain. We also theoretically investigate the effect of learning stability and the choice of hidden neurons in the proposal. From a practical perspective, we compare our proposed EWNet framework with several statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models. Experimental results show that the proposed EWNet is highly competitive compared to the state-of-the-art epidemic forecasting methods.

LGMay 12Code
EpiCastBench: Datasets and Benchmarks for Multivariate Epidemic Forecasting

Madhurima Panja, Danny D'Agostino, Huitao Li et al.

The increasing adoption of data-driven decision-making in public health has established epidemic forecasting as a critical area of research. Recent advances in multivariate forecasting models better capture complex temporal dependencies than conventional univariate approaches, which model individual series independently. Despite this potential, the development of robust epidemic forecasting methods is constrained by the lack of high-quality benchmarks comprising diverse multivariate datasets across infectious diseases and geographical regions. To address this gap, we present EpiCastBench, a large-scale benchmarking framework featuring 40 curated (correlated) multivariate epidemic datasets. These publicly available datasets span a wide range of infectious diseases and exhibit diverse characteristics in terms of temporal granularity, series length, and sparsity. We analyze these datasets to identify their global features and structural patterns. To ensure reproducibility and fair comparison, we establish standardized evaluation settings, including a unified forecasting horizon, consistent preprocessing pipelines, diverse performance metrics, and statistical significance testing. By leveraging this framework, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 15 multivariate forecasting models spanning statistical baselines to state-of-the-art deep learning and foundation models. All datasets and code are publicly available on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/aimltsf/epicastbench) and GitHub (https://github.com/aimltsf/EpiCastBench).

LGJun 9, 2023
Prediction of Transportation Index for Urban Patterns in Small and Medium-sized Indian Cities using Hybrid RidgeGAN Model

Rahisha Thottolil, Uttam Kumar, Tanujit Chakraborty

The rapid urbanization trend in most developing countries including India is creating a plethora of civic concerns such as loss of green space, degradation of environmental health, clean water availability, air pollution, traffic congestion leading to delays in vehicular transportation, etc. Transportation and network modeling through transportation indices have been widely used to understand transportation problems in the recent past. This necessitates predicting transportation indices to facilitate sustainable urban planning and traffic management. Recent advancements in deep learning research, in particular, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and their modifications in spatial data analysis such as CityGAN, Conditional GAN, and MetroGAN have enabled urban planners to simulate hyper-realistic urban patterns. These synthetic urban universes mimic global urban patterns and evaluating their landscape structures through spatial pattern analysis can aid in comprehending landscape dynamics, thereby enhancing sustainable urban planning. This research addresses several challenges in predicting the urban transportation index for small and medium-sized Indian cities. A hybrid framework based on Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR) and CityGAN is introduced to predict transportation index using spatial indicators of human settlement patterns. This paper establishes a relationship between the transportation index and human settlement indicators and models it using KRR for the selected 503 Indian cities. The proposed hybrid pipeline, we call it RidgeGAN model, can evaluate the sustainability of urban sprawl associated with infrastructure development and transportation systems in sprawling cities. Experimental results show that the two-step pipeline approach outperforms existing benchmarks based on spatial and statistical measures.

LGJul 5, 2024
Spatiotemporal Forecasting of Traffic Flow using Wavelet-based Temporal Attention

Yash Jakhmola, Madhurima Panja, Nitish Kumar Mishra et al.

Spatiotemporal forecasting of traffic flow data represents a typical problem in the field of machine learning, impacting urban traffic management systems. In general, spatiotemporal forecasting problems involve complex interactions, nonlinearities, and long-range dependencies due to the interwoven nature of the temporal and spatial dimensions. Due to this, traditional statistical and machine learning methods cannot adequately handle the temporal and spatial dependencies in these complex traffic flow datasets. A prevalent approach in the field combines graph convolutional networks and multi-head attention mechanisms for spatiotemporal processing. This paper proposes a wavelet-based temporal attention model, namely a wavelet-based dynamic spatiotemporal aware graph neural network (W-DSTAGNN), for tackling the traffic forecasting problem. Wavelet decomposition can help by decomposing the signal into components that can be analyzed independently, reducing the impact of non-stationarity and handling long-range dependencies of traffic flow datasets. Benchmark experiments using three popularly used statistical metrics confirm that our proposal efficiently captures spatiotemporal correlations and outperforms ten state-of-the-art models (including both temporal and spatiotemporal benchmarks) on three publicly available traffic datasets. Our proposed ensemble method can better handle dynamic temporal and spatial dependencies and make reliable long-term forecasts. In addition to point forecasts, our proposed model can generate interval forecasts that significantly enhance probabilistic forecasting for traffic datasets.

MLNov 24, 2023
Thompson sampling for zero-inflated count outcomes with an application to the Drink Less mobile health study

Xueqing Liu, Nina Deliu, Tanujit Chakraborty et al.

Mobile health (mHealth) interventions often aim to improve distal outcomes, such as clinical conditions, by optimizing proximal outcomes through just-in-time adaptive interventions. Contextual bandits provide a suitable framework for customizing such interventions according to individual time-varying contexts. However, unique challenges, such as modeling count outcomes within bandit frameworks, have hindered the widespread application of contextual bandits to mHealth studies. The current work addresses this challenge by leveraging count data models into online decision-making approaches. Specifically, we combine four common offline count data models (Poisson, negative binomial, zero-inflated Poisson, and zero-inflated negative binomial regressions) with Thompson sampling, a popular contextual bandit algorithm. The proposed algorithms are motivated by and evaluated on a real dataset from the Drink Less trial, where they are shown to improve user engagement with the mHealth platform. The proposed methods are further evaluated on simulated data, achieving improvement in maximizing cumulative proximal outcomes over existing algorithms. Theoretical results on regret bounds are also derived. The countts R package provides an implementation of our approach.

CRJul 2, 2024
Footprints of Data in a Classifier: Understanding the Privacy Risks and Solution Strategies

Payel Sadhukhan, Tanujit Chakraborty

The widespread deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across government and private industries brings both advancements and heightened privacy and security concerns. Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates the Right to Erasure, requiring data to be permanently removed from a system to prevent potential compromise. While existing research primarily focuses on erasing sensitive data attributes, several passive data compromise mechanisms remain underexplored and unaddressed. One such issue arises from the residual footprints of training data embedded within predictive models. Performance disparities between test and training data can inadvertently reveal which data points were part of the training set, posing a privacy risk. This study examines how two fundamental aspects of classifier systems - training data quality and classifier training methodology - contribute to privacy vulnerabilities. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that classifiers exhibit universal vulnerability under conditions of data imbalance and distributional shifts. Empirical findings reinforce our theoretical results, highlighting the significant role of training data quality in classifier susceptibility. Additionally, our study reveals that a classifier's operational mechanism and architectural design impact its vulnerability. We further investigate mitigation strategies through data obfuscation techniques and analyze their impact on both privacy and classification performance. To aid practitioners, we introduce a privacy-performance trade-off index, providing a structured approach to balancing privacy protection with model effectiveness. The findings offer valuable insights for selecting classifiers and curating training data in diverse real-world applications.

LGMar 12
EnTransformer: A Deep Generative Transformer for Multivariate Probabilistic Forecasting

Rajdeep Pathak, Rahul Goswami, Madhurima Panja et al.

Reliable uncertainty quantification is critical in multivariate time series forecasting problems arising in domains such as energy systems and transportation networks, among many others. Although Transformer-based architectures have recently achieved strong performance for sequence modeling, most probabilistic forecasting approaches rely on restrictive parametric likelihoods or quantile-based objectives. They can struggle to capture complex joint predictive distributions across multiple correlated time series. This work proposes EnTransformer, a deep generative forecasting framework that integrates engression, a stochastic learning paradigm for modeling conditional distributions, with the expressive sequence modeling capabilities of Transformers. The proposed approach injects stochastic noise into the model representation and optimizes an energy-based scoring objective to directly learn the conditional predictive distribution without imposing parametric assumptions. This design enables EnTransformer to generate coherent multivariate forecast trajectories while preserving Transformers' capacity to effectively model long-range temporal dependencies and cross-series interactions. We evaluate our proposed EnTransformer on several widely used benchmarks for multivariate probabilistic forecasting, including Electricity, Traffic, Solar, Taxi, KDD-cup, and Wikipedia datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that EnTransformer produces well-calibrated probabilistic forecasts and consistently outperforms the benchmark models.

LGMay 5
Graph Convolutional Support Vector Regression for Robust Spatiotemporal Forecasting of Urban Air Pollution

Nourin Jahan, Madhurima Panja, Muhammed Navas T et al.

Urban air quality forecasting is challenging because pollutant concentrations are nonlinear, nonstationary, spatiotemporally dependent, and often affected by anomalous observations caused by traffic congestion, industrial emissions, and seasonal meteorological variability. This study proposes a Graph Convolutional Support Vector Regression (GCSVR) framework for robust spatiotemporal forecasting of urban air pollution. The model combines graph convolutional learning to capture inter-station spatial dependence with support vector regression to model nonlinear temporal dynamics while reducing sensitivity to outlier observations. The proposed framework is evaluated using air quality records from 37 monitoring stations in Delhi and 18 stations in Mumbai, representing inland and coastal metropolitan environments in India. Forecasting performance is assessed across multiple horizons and compared with established temporal and spatiotemporal benchmarks. The results show that GCSVR consistently improves predictive accuracy and maintains stable performance across seasons and outlier-prone pollution episodes. Statistical test further confirms the reliability of the proposed approach across the two cities. Finally, conformal prediction is integrated with GCSVR to generate calibrated prediction intervals, enhancing its practical value for uncertainty-aware air quality monitoring and public health decision-making.

LGMar 4, 2024
Survival modeling using deep learning, machine learning and statistical methods: A comparative analysis for predicting mortality after hospital admission

Ziwen Wang, Jin Wee Lee, Tanujit Chakraborty et al.

Survival analysis is essential for studying time-to-event outcomes and providing a dynamic understanding of the probability of an event occurring over time. Various survival analysis techniques, from traditional statistical models to state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, support healthcare intervention and policy decisions. However, there remains ongoing discussion about their comparative performance. We conducted a comparative study of several survival analysis methods, including Cox proportional hazards (CoxPH), stepwise CoxPH, elastic net penalized Cox model, Random Survival Forests (RSF), Gradient Boosting machine (GBM) learning, AutoScore-Survival, DeepSurv, time-dependent Cox model based on neural network (CoxTime), and DeepHit survival neural network. We applied the concordance index (C-index) for model goodness-of-fit, and integral Brier scores (IBS) for calibration, and considered the model interpretability. As a case study, we performed a retrospective analysis of patients admitted through the emergency department of a tertiary hospital from 2017 to 2019, predicting 90-day all-cause mortality based on patient demographics, clinicopathological features, and historical data. The results of the C-index indicate that deep learning achieved comparable performance, with DeepSurv producing the best discrimination (DeepSurv: 0.893; CoxTime: 0.892; DeepHit: 0.891). The calibration of DeepSurv (IBS: 0.041) performed the best, followed by RSF (IBS: 0.042) and GBM (IBS: 0.0421), all using the full variables. Moreover, AutoScore-Survival, using a minimal variable subset, is easy to interpret, and can achieve good discrimination and calibration (C-index: 0.867; IBS: 0.044). While all models were satisfactory, DeepSurv exhibited the best discrimination and calibration. In addition, AutoScore-Survival offers a more parsimonious model and excellent interpretability.

LGApr 8, 2024
WaveCatBoost for Probabilistic Forecasting of Regional Air Quality Data

Jintu Borah, Tanujit Chakraborty, Md. Shahrul Md. Nadzir et al.

Accurate and reliable air quality forecasting is essential for protecting public health, sustainable development, pollution control, and enhanced urban planning. This letter presents a novel WaveCatBoost architecture designed to forecast the real-time concentrations of air pollutants by combining the maximal overlapping discrete wavelet transform (MODWT) with the CatBoost model. This hybrid approach efficiently transforms time series into high-frequency and low-frequency components, thereby extracting signal from noise and improving prediction accuracy and robustness. Evaluation of two distinct regional datasets, from the Central Air Pollution Control Board (CPCB) sensor network and a low-cost air quality sensor system (LAQS), underscores the superior performance of our proposed methodology in real-time forecasting compared to the state-of-the-art statistical and deep learning architectures. Moreover, we employ a conformal prediction strategy to provide probabilistic bands with our forecasts.

LGFeb 15, 2025
Epidemic-guided deep learning for spatiotemporal forecasting of Tuberculosis outbreak

Madhab Barman, Madhurima Panja, Nachiketa Mishra et al.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a formidable global health challenge, driven by complex spatiotemporal transmission dynamics and influenced by factors such as population mobility and behavioral changes. We propose an Epidemic-Guided Deep Learning (EGDL) approach that fuses mechanistic epidemiological principles with advanced deep learning techniques to enhance early warning systems and intervention strategies for TB outbreaks. Our framework is built upon a modified networked Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (MN-SIR) model augmented with a saturated incidence rate and graph Laplacian diffusion, capturing both long-term transmission dynamics and region-specific population mobility patterns. Compartmental model parameters are rigorously estimated using Bayesian inference via the Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach. Theoretical analysis leveraging the comparison principle and Green's formula establishes global stability properties of the disease-free and endemic equilibria. Building on these epidemiological insights, we design two forecasting architectures, EGDL-Parallel and EGDL-Series, that integrate the mechanistic outputs of the MN-SIR model within deep neural networks. This integration mitigates the overfitting risks commonly encountered in data-driven methods and filters out noise inherent in surveillance data, resulting in reliable forecasts of real-world epidemic trends. Experiments conducted on TB incidence data from 47 prefectures in Japan and 31 provinces in mainland China demonstrate that our approach delivers robust and accurate predictions across multiple time horizons (short to medium-term forecasts), supporting its generalizability across regions with different population dynamics.

MLMar 7
Deep Generative Spatiotemporal Engression for Probabilistic Forecasting of Epidemics

Rajdeep Pathak, Tanujit Chakraborty

Accurate and reliable forecasting of epidemic incidences is critical for public health preparedness, yet it remains a challenging task due to complex nonlinear temporal dependencies and heterogeneous spatial interactions. Often, point forecasts generated by spatiotemporal models are unreliable in assigning uncertainty to future epidemic events. Probabilistic forecasting of epidemics is therefore crucial for providing the best or worst-case scenarios rather than a simple, often inaccurate, point estimate. We present deep spatiotemporal engression methods to generate accurate and reliable probabilistic forecasts on low-frequency epidemic datasets. The proposed methods act as distributional lenses, and out-of-sample probabilistic forecasts are generated by sampling from the trained models. Our frameworks encapsulate lightweight deep generative architectures, wherein uncertainty is quantified endogenously, driven by a pre-additive noise component during model construction. We establish geometric ergodicity and asymptotic stationarity of the spatiotemporal engression processes under mild assumptions on the network weights and pre-additive noise process. Comprehensive evaluations across six epidemiological datasets over three forecast horizons demonstrate that the proposal consistently outperforms several temporal and spatiotemporal benchmarks in both point and probabilistic forecasting. Additionally, we explore the explainability of the proposal to enhance the models' practical application for informed, timely public health interventions.

EMSep 8, 2025
Neural ARFIMA model for forecasting BRIC exchange rates with long memory under oil shocks and policy uncertainties

Tanujit Chakraborty, Donia Besher, Madhurima Panja et al.

Accurate forecasting of exchange rates remains a persistent challenge, particularly for emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC). These series exhibit long memory, nonlinearity, and non-stationarity properties that conventional time series models struggle to capture. Additionally, there exist several key drivers of exchange rate dynamics, including global economic policy uncertainty, US equity market volatility, US monetary policy uncertainty, oil price growth rates, and country-specific short-term interest rate differentials. These empirical complexities underscore the need for a flexible modeling framework that can jointly accommodate long memory, nonlinearity, and the influence of external drivers. To address these challenges, we propose a Neural AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (NARFIMA) model that combines the long-memory representation of ARFIMA with the nonlinear learning capacity of neural networks, while flexibly incorporating exogenous causal variables. We establish theoretical properties of the model, including asymptotic stationarity of the NARFIMA process using Markov chains and nonlinear time series techniques. We quantify forecast uncertainty using conformal prediction intervals within the NARFIMA framework. Empirical results across six forecast horizons show that NARFIMA consistently outperforms various state-of-the-art statistical and machine learning models in forecasting BRIC exchange rates. These findings provide new insights for policymakers and market participants navigating volatile financial conditions. The \texttt{narfima} \textbf{R} package provides an implementation of our approach.

LGMar 7
Turning Time Series into Algebraic Equations: Symbolic Machine Learning for Interpretable Modeling of Chaotic Time Series

Madhurima Panja, Grace Younes, Tanujit Chakraborty

Chaotic time series are notoriously difficult to forecast. Small uncertainties in initial conditions amplify rapidly, while strong nonlinearities and regime dependent variability constrain predictability. Although modern deep learning often delivers strong short horizon accuracy, its black box nature limits scientific insight and practical trust in settings where understanding the underlying dynamics matters. To address this gap, we propose two complementary symbolic forecasters that learn explicit, interpretable algebraic equations from chaotic time series data. Symbolic Neural Forecaster (SyNF) adapts a neural network based equation learning architecture to the forecasting setting, enabling fully differentiable discovery of compact and interpretable algebraic relations. The Symbolic Tree Forecaster (SyTF) builds on evolutionary symbolic regression to search directly over equation structures under a principled accuracy complexity trade off. We evaluate both approaches in a rolling window nowcasting setting with one step ahead forecasting using several accuracy metrics and compare against a broad suite of baselines spanning classical statistical models, tree ensembles, and modern deep learning architectures. Numerical experiments cover a benchmark of 132 low dimensional chaotic attractors and two real world chaotic time series, namely weekly dengue incidence in San Juan and the Nino 3.4 sea surface temperature index. Across datasets, symbolic forecasters achieve competitive one step ahead accuracy while providing transparent equations that reveal salient aspects of the underlying dynamics.

AO-PHOct 28, 2025
Forecasting precipitation in the Arctic using probabilistic machine learning informed by causal climate drivers

Madhurima Panja, Dhiman Das, Tanujit Chakraborty et al.

Understanding and forecasting precipitation events in the Arctic maritime environments, such as Bear Island and Ny-Ålesund, is crucial for assessing climate risk and developing early warning systems in vulnerable marine regions. This study proposes a probabilistic machine learning framework for modeling and predicting the dynamics and severity of precipitation. We begin by analyzing the scale-dependent relationships between precipitation and key atmospheric drivers (e.g., temperature, relative humidity, cloud cover, and air pressure) using wavelet coherence, which captures localized dependencies across time and frequency domains. To assess joint causal influences, we employ Synergistic-Unique-Redundant Decomposition, which quantifies the impact of interaction effects among each variable on future precipitation dynamics. These insights inform the development of data-driven forecasting models that incorporate both historical precipitation and causal climate drivers. To account for uncertainty, we employ the conformal prediction method, which enables the generation of calibrated non-parametric prediction intervals. Our results underscore the importance of utilizing a comprehensive framework that combines causal analysis with probabilistic forecasting to enhance the reliability and interpretability of precipitation predictions in Arctic marine environments.

EMOct 27, 2025
Macroeconomic Forecasting for the G7 countries under Uncertainty Shocks

Shovon Sengupta, Sunny Kumar Singh, Tanujit Chakraborty

Accurate macroeconomic forecasting has become harder amid geopolitical disruptions, policy reversals, and volatile financial markets. Conventional vector autoregressions (VARs) overfit in high dimensional settings, while threshold VARs struggle with time varying interdependencies and complex parameter structures. We address these limitations by extending the Sims Zha Bayesian VAR with exogenous variables (SZBVARx) to incorporate domain-informed shrinkage and four newspaper based uncertainty shocks such as economic policy uncertainty, geopolitical risk, US equity market volatility, and US monetary policy uncertainty. The framework improves structural interpretability, mitigates dimensionality, and imposes empirically guided regularization. Using G7 data, we study spillovers from uncertainty shocks to five core variables (unemployment, real broad effective exchange rates, short term rates, oil prices, and CPI inflation), combining wavelet coherence (time frequency dynamics) with nonlinear local projections (state dependent impulse responses). Out-of-sample results at 12 and 24 month horizons show that SZBVARx outperforms 14 benchmarks, including classical VARs and leading machine learning models, as confirmed by Murphy difference diagrams, multivariate Diebold Mariano tests, and Giacomini White predictability tests. Credible Bayesian prediction intervals deliver robust uncertainty quantification for scenario analysis and risk management. The proposed SZBVARx offers G7 policymakers a transparent, well calibrated tool for modern macroeconomic forecasting under pervasive uncertainty.

GEO-PHAug 7, 2025
Salt-Rock Creep Deformation Forecasting Using Deep Neural Networks and Analytical Models for Subsurface Energy Storage Applications

Pradeep Kumar Shukla, Tanujit Chakraborty, Mustafa Sari et al.

This study provides an in-depth analysis of time series forecasting methods to predict the time-dependent deformation trend (also known as creep) of salt rock under varying confining pressure conditions. Creep deformation assessment is essential for designing and operating underground storage facilities for nuclear waste, hydrogen energy, or radioactive materials. Salt rocks, known for their mechanical properties like low porosity, low permeability, high ductility, and exceptional creep and self-healing capacities, were examined using multi-stage triaxial (MSTL) creep data. After resampling, axial strain datasets were recorded at 5--10 second intervals under confining pressure levels ranging from 5 to 35 MPa over 5.8--21 days. Initial analyses, including Seasonal-Trend Decomposition (STL) and Granger causality tests, revealed minimal seasonality and causality between axial strain and temperature data. Further statistical tests, such as the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test, confirmed the stationarity of the data with p-values less than 0.05, and wavelet coherence plot (WCP) analysis indicated repeating trends. A suite of deep neural network (DNN) models (Neural Basis Expansion Analysis for Time Series (N-BEATS), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and Transformers (TF)) was utilized and compared against statistical baseline models. Predictive performance was evaluated using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), and Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE). Results demonstrated that N-BEATS and TCN models outperformed others across various stress levels, respectively. DNN models, particularly N-BEATS and TCN, showed a 15--20\% improvement in accuracy over traditional analytical models, effectively capturing complex temporal dependencies and patterns.

GEO-PHJan 25, 2024
When Geoscience Meets Generative AI and Large Language Models: Foundations, Trends, and Future Challenges

Abdenour Hadid, Tanujit Chakraborty, Daniel Busby

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) represents an emerging field that promises the creation of synthetic data and outputs in different modalities. GAI has recently shown impressive results across a large spectrum of applications ranging from biology, medicine, education, legislation, computer science, and finance. As one strives for enhanced safety, efficiency, and sustainability, generative AI indeed emerges as a key differentiator and promises a paradigm shift in the field. This paper explores the potential applications of generative AI and large language models in geoscience. The recent developments in the field of machine learning and deep learning have enabled the generative model's utility for tackling diverse prediction problems, simulation, and multi-criteria decision-making challenges related to geoscience and Earth system dynamics. This survey discusses several GAI models that have been used in geoscience comprising generative adversarial networks (GANs), physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), and generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)-based structures. These tools have helped the geoscience community in several applications, including (but not limited to) data generation/augmentation, super-resolution, panchromatic sharpening, haze removal, restoration, and land surface changing. Some challenges still remain such as ensuring physical interpretation, nefarious use cases, and trustworthiness. Beyond that, GAI models show promises to the geoscience community, especially with the support to climate change, urban science, atmospheric science, marine science, and planetary science through their extraordinary ability to data-driven modeling and uncertainty quantification.

MLDec 10, 2023
Skew-Probabilistic Neural Networks for Learning from Imbalanced Data

Shraddha M. Naik, Tanujit Chakraborty, Madhurima Panja et al.

Real-world datasets often exhibit imbalanced data distribution, where certain class levels are severely underrepresented. In such cases, traditional pattern classifiers have shown a bias towards the majority class, impeding accurate predictions for the minority class. This paper introduces an imbalanced data-oriented classifier using probabilistic neural networks (PNN) with a skew-normal kernel function to address this major challenge. PNN is known for providing probabilistic outputs, enabling quantification of prediction confidence, interpretability, and the ability to handle limited data. By leveraging the skew-normal distribution, which offers increased flexibility, particularly for imbalanced and non-symmetric data, our proposed Skew-Probabilistic Neural Networks (SkewPNN) can better represent underlying class densities. Hyperparameter fine-tuning is imperative to optimize the performance of the proposed approach on imbalanced datasets. To this end, we employ a population-based heuristic algorithm, the Bat optimization algorithm, to explore the hyperparameter space effectively. We also prove the statistical consistency of the density estimates, suggesting that the true distribution will be approached smoothly as the sample size increases. Theoretical analysis of the computational complexity of the proposed SkewPNN and BA-SkewPNN is also provided. Numerical simulations have been conducted on different synthetic datasets, comparing various benchmark-imbalanced learners. Real-data analysis on several datasets shows that SkewPNN and BA-SkewPNN substantially outperform most state-of-the-art machine-learning methods for both balanced and imbalanced datasets (binary and multi-class categories) in most experimental settings.

LGJun 9, 2021
Optimized ensemble deep learning framework for scalable forecasting of dynamics containing extreme events

Arnob Ray, Tanujit Chakraborty, Dibakar Ghosh

The remarkable flexibility and adaptability of both deep learning models and ensemble methods have led to the proliferation for their application in understanding many physical phenomena. Traditionally, these two techniques have largely been treated as independent methodologies in practical applications. This study develops an optimized ensemble deep learning (OEDL) framework wherein these two machine learning techniques are jointly used to achieve synergistic improvements in model accuracy, stability, scalability, and reproducibility prompting a new wave of applications in the forecasting of dynamics. Unpredictability is considered as one of the key features of chaotic dynamics, so forecasting such dynamics of nonlinear systems is a relevant issue in the scientific community. It becomes more challenging when the prediction of extreme events is the focus issue for us. In this circumstance, the proposed OEDL model based on a best convex combination of feed-forward neural networks, reservoir computing, and long short-term memory can play a key role in advancing predictions of dynamics consisting of extreme events. The combined framework can generate the best out-of-sample performance than the individual deep learners and standard ensemble framework for both numerically simulated and real world data sets. We exhibit the outstanding performance of the OEDL framework for forecasting extreme events generated from Lienard-type system, prediction of COVID-19 cases in Brazil, dengue cases in San Juan, and sea surface temperature in Nino 3.4 region.

LGOct 25, 2018
Superensemble Classifier for Improving Predictions in Imbalanced Datasets

Tanujit Chakraborty, Ashis Kumar Chakraborty

Learning from an imbalanced dataset is a tricky proposition. Because these datasets are biased towards one class, most existing classifiers tend not to perform well on minority class examples. Conventional classifiers usually aim to optimize the overall accuracy without considering the relative distribution of each class. This article presents a superensemble classifier, to tackle and improve predictions in imbalanced classification problems, that maps Hellinger distance decision trees (HDDT) into radial basis function network (RBFN) framework. Regularity conditions for universal consistency and the idea of parameter optimization of the proposed model are provided. The proposed distribution-free model can be applied for feature selection cum imbalanced classification problems. We have also provided enough numerical evidence using various real-life data sets to assess the performance of the proposed model. Its effectiveness and competitiveness with respect to different state-of-the-art models are shown.

LGMay 31, 2018
Imbalanced Ensemble Classifier for learning from imbalanced business school data set

Tanujit Chakraborty

Private business schools in India face a common problem of selecting quality students for their MBA programs to achieve the desired placement percentage. Generally, such data sets are biased towards one class, i.e., imbalanced in nature. And learning from the imbalanced dataset is a difficult proposition. This paper proposes an imbalanced ensemble classifier which can handle the imbalanced nature of the dataset and achieves higher accuracy in case of the feature selection (selection of important characteristics of students) cum classification problem (prediction of placements based on the students' characteristics) for Indian business school dataset. The optimal value of an important model parameter is found. Numerical evidence is also provided using Indian business school dataset to assess the outstanding performance of the proposed classifier.