The reconstitution predictive network for precipitation nowcasting

Abstract

Precipitation nowcasting is an indispensable task for traffic routing and disaster avoidance. Due to its strenuous movement, even the most recent deep learning techniques in computer vision deliver unsatisfactory performance. The main reason can be attributed to the following two aspects: 1) The traditional convolution in the input has a limited field to extract spatial representation. 2) The convolution in state-to-state connection might lead to mismatch problems and inaccurate strength predictions. To address the two drawbacks, we propose an innovative algorithm the Reconstitute Spatiotemporal LSTM (RST-LSTM) based on Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (ConvRNN). In the proposed model, we present the local and global reconstitution scheme into the current input and the hidden state respectively. The local reconstitution (LR) can adaptively adjust the perceptual field of convolution so as to extract more useful spatial information and exclude invalid representation. Moreover, in the hidden state, the global reconstitution (GR) is embedded to alleviate the problem of mismatching between the current input and hidden state. Experimental results in MovingMNIST++ show that our approach can achieve the best predictions for those data with more drastic changes in the adjacent time. For radar data in CIKM AnalytiCup 2017 (we name it RadarCIKM in this paper), our method outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors. Furthermore, we notice that GR can promote the nowcasting in the high radar echo region and LR can reduce the error.