Yiyi Huang

Sahara Ali, Omar Faruque, Yiyi Huang et al.

The warming of the Arctic, also known as Arctic amplification, is led by several atmospheric and oceanic drivers. However, the details of its underlying thermodynamic causes are still unknown. Inferring the causal effects of atmospheric processes on sea ice melt using fixed treatment effect strategies leads to unrealistic counterfactual estimations. Such models are also prone to bias due to time-varying confoundedness. Further, the complex non-linearity in Earth science data makes it infeasible to perform causal inference using existing marginal structural techniques. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose TCINet - time-series causal inference model to infer causation under continuous treatment using recurrent neural networks and a novel probabilistic balancing technique. Through experiments on synthetic and observational data, we show how our research can substantially improve the ability to quantify leading causes of Arctic sea ice melt, further paving paths for causal inference in observational Earth science.

Sahara Ali, Uzma Hasan, Xingyan Li et al.

This survey paper covers the breadth and depth of time-series and spatiotemporal causality methods, and their applications in Earth Science. More specifically, the paper presents an overview of causal discovery and causal inference, explains the underlying causal assumptions, and enlists evaluation techniques and key terminologies of the domain area. The paper elicits the various state-of-the-art methods introduced for time-series and spatiotemporal causal analysis along with their strengths and limitations. The paper further describes the existing applications of several methods for answering specific Earth Science questions such as extreme weather events, sea level rise, teleconnections etc. This survey paper can serve as a primer for Data Science researchers interested in data-driven causal study as we share a list of resources, such as Earth Science datasets (synthetic, simulated and observational data) and open source tools for causal analysis. It will equally benefit the Earth Science community interested in taking an AI-driven approach to study the causality of different dynamic and thermodynamic processes as we present the open challenges and opportunities in performing causality-based Earth Science study.

Zhongyi Zhou, Jing Jin, Vrushank Phadnis et al.

Visual programming has the potential of providing novice programmers with a low-code experience to build customized processing pipelines. Existing systems typically require users to build pipelines from scratch, implying that novice users are expected to set up and link appropriate nodes from a blank workspace. In this paper, we introduce InstructPipe, an AI assistant for prototyping machine learning (ML) pipelines with text instructions. We contribute two large language model (LLM) modules and a code interpreter as part of our framework. The LLM modules generate pseudocode for a target pipeline, and the interpreter renders the pipeline in the node-graph editor for further human-AI collaboration. Both technical and user evaluation (N=16) shows that InstructPipe empowers users to streamline their ML pipeline workflow, reduce their learning curve, and leverage open-ended commands to spark innovative ideas.

Xin Huang, Xuejiao Tang, Wenbin Zhang et al.

In this paper, we design and implement a generic medical knowledge based system (MKBS) for identifying diseases from several symptoms. In this system, some important aspects like knowledge bases system, knowledge representation, inference engine have been addressed. The system asks users different questions and inference engines will use the certainty factor to prune out low possible solutions. The proposed disease diagnosis system also uses a graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate users to interact with the expert system. Our expert system is generic and flexible, which can be integrated with any rule bases system in disease diagnosis.

Sahara Ali, Yiyi Huang, Xin Huang et al.

Accurately forecasting Arctic sea ice from subseasonal to seasonal scales has been a major scientific effort with fundamental challenges at play. In addition to physics-based earth system models, researchers have been applying multiple statistical and machine learning models for sea ice forecasting. Looking at the potential of data-driven sea ice forecasting, we propose an attention-based Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) ensemble method to predict monthly sea ice extent up to 1 month ahead. Using daily and monthly satellite retrieved sea ice data from NSIDC and atmospheric and oceanic variables from ERA5 reanalysis product for 39 years, we show that our multi-temporal ensemble method outperforms several baseline and recently proposed deep learning models. This will substantially improve our ability in predicting future Arctic sea ice changes, which is fundamental for forecasting transporting routes, resource development, coastal erosion, threats to Arctic coastal communities and wildlife.