Prompt Federated Learning for Weather Forecasting: Toward Foundation Models on Meteorological Data

Prompt Federated Learning for Weather Forecasting: Toward Foundation Models on Meteorological Data

Shengchao Chen, Guodong Long, Tao Shen, Jing Jiang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3532-3540. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/393

To tackle the global climate challenge, it urgently needs to develop a collaborative platform for comprehensive weather forecasting on large-scale meteorological data. Despite urgency, heterogeneous meteorological sensors across countries and regions, inevitably causing multivariate heterogeneity and data exposure, become the main barrier. This paper develops a foundation model across regions capable of understanding complex meteorological data and providing weather forecasting. To relieve the data exposure concern across regions, a novel federated learning approach has been proposed to collaboratively learn a brand-new spatio-temporal Transformer-based foundation model across participants with heterogeneous meteorological data. Moreover, a novel prompt learning mechanism has been adopted to satisfy low-resourced sensors' communication and computational constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated on classical weather forecasting tasks using three meteorological datasets with multivariate time series.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Federated learning
Machine Learning: ML: Time series and data streams