Learning Wildfire Model from Incomplete State Observations
This work addresses wildfire prediction for resource management, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models by handling incomplete data.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting wildfires in the western United States using historical burned area and climate data, achieving higher prediction performance on average compared to existing approaches that do not account for incomplete state observations.
As wildfires are expected to become more frequent and severe, improved prediction models are vital to mitigating risk and allocating resources. With remote sensing data, valuable spatiotemporal statistical models can be created and used for resource management practices. In this paper, we create a dynamic model for future wildfire predictions of five locations within the western United States through a deep neural network via historical burned area and climate data. The proposed model has distinct features that address the characteristic need in prediction evaluations, including dynamic online estimation and time-series modeling. Between locations, local fire event triggers are not isolated, and there are confounding factors when local data is analyzed due to incomplete state observations. When compared to existing approaches that do not account for incomplete state observation within wildfire time-series data, on average, we are able to achieve higher prediction performances.