Lightning UQ Box: A Comprehensive Framework for Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is an essential tool for applying deep neural networks (DNNs) to real world tasks, as it attaches a degree of confidence to DNN outputs. However, despite its benefits, UQ is often left out of the standard DNN workflow due to the additional technical knowledge required to apply and evaluate existing UQ procedures. Hence there is a need for a comprehensive toolbox that allows the user to integrate UQ into their modelling workflow, without significant overhead. We introduce \texttt{Lightning UQ Box}: a unified interface for applying and evaluating various approaches to UQ. In this paper, we provide a theoretical and quantitative comparison of the wide range of state-of-the-art UQ methods implemented in our toolbox. We focus on two challenging vision tasks: (i) estimating tropical cyclone wind speeds from infrared satellite imagery and (ii) estimating the power output of solar panels from RGB images of the sky. By highlighting the differences between methods our results demonstrate the need for a broad and approachable experimental framework for UQ, that can be used for benchmarking UQ methods. The toolbox, example implementations, and further information are available at: https://github.com/lightning-uq-box/lightning-uq-box

Uncertainty Aware Tropical Cyclone Wind Speed Estimation from Satellite Data

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successfully applied to earth observation (EO) data and opened new research avenues. Despite the theoretical and practical advances of these techniques, DNNs are still considered black box tools and by default are designed to give point predictions. However, the majority of EO applications demand reliable uncertainty estimates that can support practitioners in critical decision making tasks. This work provides a theoretical and quantitative comparison of existing uncertainty quantification methods for DNNs applied to the task of wind speed estimation in satellite imagery of tropical cyclones. We provide a detailed evaluation of predictive uncertainty estimates from state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for DNNs. We find that predictive uncertainties can be utilized to further improve accuracy and analyze the predictive uncertainties of different methods across storm categories.