XGB+FM for Severe Convection Forecast and Factor Selection

Abstract

In the field of meteorology, radiosonde data and observation data are critical for analyzing regional meteorological characteristics. Because of the high false alarm rate, severe convection forecasting is still challenging. In addition, the existing methods are difficult to use to capture the interaction of meteorological factors at the same time. In this research, a cascade of extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) for feature transformation and a factorization machine (FM) for second-order feature interaction to capture the nonlinear interaction—XGB+FM—is proposed. An attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory (Att-Bi-LSTM) network is proposed to impute the missing data of meteorological observation stations. The problem of class imbalance is resolved by the support vector machines–synthetic minority oversampling technique (SVM-SMOTE), in which two oversampling strategies based on the support vector discrimination mechanism are proposed. It is proven that the method is effective, and the threat score (TS) is 7.27~14.28% higher than other methods. Moreover, we propose the meteorological factor selection method based on XGB+FM and improve the forecast accuracy, which is one of our contributions, as well as the forecast system.