Back To The Future: A Hybrid Transformer-XGBoost Model for Action-oriented Future-proofing Nowcasting

Inspired by the iconic movie Back to the Future, this paper explores an innovative adaptive nowcasting approach that reimagines the relationship between present actions and future outcomes. In the movie, characters travel through time to manipulate past events, aiming to create a better future. Analogously, our framework employs predictive insights about the future to inform and adjust present conditions. This dual-stage model integrates the forecasting power of Transformers (future visionary) with the interpretability and efficiency of XGBoost (decision maker), enabling a seamless loop of future prediction and present adaptation. Through experimentation with meteorological datasets, we demonstrate the framework's advantage in achieving more accurate forecasting while guiding actionable interventions for real-time applications.

K-means Derived Unsupervised Feature Selection using Improved ADMM

Feature selection is important for high-dimensional data analysis and is non-trivial in unsupervised learning problems such as dimensionality reduction and clustering. The goal of unsupervised feature selection is finding a subset of features such that the data points from different clusters are well separated. This paper presents a novel method called K-means Derived Unsupervised Feature Selection (K-means UFS). Unlike most existing spectral analysis based unsupervised feature selection methods, we select features using the objective of K-means. We develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the NP-hard optimization problem of our K-means UFS model. Extensive experiments on real datasets show that our K-means UFS is more effective than the baselines in selecting features for clustering.