A probabilistic track model for tropical cyclone risk assessment using multitask learning

Abstract

Tropical cyclone (TC) track forecasting is critical for wind risk assessment. This work proposes a novel probabilistic TC track forecasting model based on mixture density network (MDN) and multitask learning (MTL). The existing NN-based probabilistic TC track prediction models focus on directly modeling the distribution of the future TC positions. Multitask learning has been shown to boost the performance of single tasks when the tasks are relevant. This work divides the probabilistic track prediction task into two sub-tasks: a deterministic prediction of the future TC position and a probabilistic prediction of the residual between the deterministic prediction and the actual TC location. The MDN is employed to realize the probabilistic prediction task. Since the target values of the MDN in this work are the residuals, which depend on the prediction result of the deterministic task, a novel training method is developed to train the MTL model properly. The proposed model is tested against statistical and other learning-based models on historical TC data. The results show that the proposed model outperforms other models in making probabilistic predictions. This approach advances TC track forecasting by integrating MDN and MTL, showing promise in enhancing probabilistic predictions and improving disaster preparedness.