A Deep Hybrid Model for Weather Forecasting

Weather forecasting is a canonical predictive challenge that has depended primarily on model-based methods. We explore new directions with forecasting weather as a data intensive challenge that involves inferences across space and time. We study specifically the power of making predictions via a hybrid approach that combines discriminatively trained predictive models with a deep neural network that models the joint statistics of a set of weather-related variables. We show how the base model can be enhanced with spatial interpolation that uses learned long-range spatial dependencies. We also derive an efficient learning and inference procedure that allows for large scale optimization of the model parameters. We evaluate the methods with experiments on real-world meteorological data that highlight the promise of the approach.