Explainable AI-Based Interface System for Weather Forecasting Model

Machine learning (ML) is becoming increasingly popular in meteorological decision-making. Although the literature on explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is growing steadily, user-centered XAI studies have not extend to this domain yet. This study defines three requirements for explanations of black-box models in meteorology through user studies: statistical model performance for different rainfall scenarios to identify model bias, model reasoning, and the confidence of model outputs. Appropriate XAI methods are mapped to each requirement, and the generated explanations are tested quantitatively and qualitatively. An XAI interface system is designed based on user feedback. The results indicate that the explanations increase decision utility and user trust. Users prefer intuitive explanations over those based on XAI algorithms even for potentially easy-to-recognize examples. These findings can provide evidence for future research on user-centered XAI algorithms, as well as a basis to improve the usability of AI systems in practice.

xPatch: Dual-Stream Time Series Forecasting with Exponential Seasonal-Trend Decomposition

In recent years, the application of transformer-based models in time-series forecasting has received significant attention. While often demonstrating promising results, the transformer architecture encounters challenges in fully exploiting the temporal relations within time series data due to its attention mechanism. In this work, we design eXponential Patch (xPatch for short), a novel dual-stream architecture that utilizes exponential decomposition. Inspired by the classical exponential smoothing approaches, xPatch introduces the innovative seasonal-trend exponential decomposition module. Additionally, we propose a dual-flow architecture that consists of an MLP-based linear stream and a CNN-based non-linear stream. This model investigates the benefits of employing patching and channel-independence techniques within a non-transformer model. Finally, we develop a robust arctangent loss function and a sigmoid learning rate adjustment scheme, which prevent overfitting and boost forecasting performance. The code is available at the following repository: https://github.com/stitsyuk/xPatch.