Forecasting Using

Machine Learning Techniques

in Energy, Environment and
Agriculture
Daniel L. Silver, PhD, CIM
Outline
• Introduction
• Typical Problem and Approaches
• Spatio-Temporal Project Overviews:
• Classifying fishing activity
• Solar energy forecasting
• Building energy management
• Water flow rate estimation
• Aquifer recharge prediction
• Cantelope melon yield
• FOCAL - UAV image classification
• Estimage – Counting things in images

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Acadia Institute for Data Analytics (AIDA)

Foci:
Agriculture,
Oceans,
Environment,
Green Energy,
Health Care

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Typical Domain: AIS Data
• Automatic Identification System
on vessel transmits:
• time stamp
• vessel position (GPS),
• identity,
• speed and course.
• Received by marine traffic control
and all other AIS equipped
vessels within range.
• Various problems can be posed:
• Type of vessel?
• Current activity?
• Next action?
• Probability of intersection?

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 Typical Problem and Approaches
Problem can be framed as:
• Structured prediction
• Time series classification
• Image recognition
Not-fishing
Fishing
• Mix of data
• Input: temporal, spatial, auto-
regressive, static or independently
varying
• Target: prediction, next state or class
• Temporal variance
• Convert to common periodic signal
• Include time signal
• Spatial variance
• Normalize for scale, rotation, trans.
• Use convolutional methods
• Sequential data
• Convert to sliding window and use
standard ML and Deep NN
• Use recurrent neural network (RNN)
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Classifying Fishing Activity
• Structured prediction

under-sampling

• Image recognition

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 Classifying Fishing Activity
• Structured prediction

Partition-wise Recurrent Neural Networks (pRNNs) to Identify Fishing Activities

[submitted ESANN, IJCNN - X. Jiang, D. Silver et al. 2016]

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Solar Energy Forecasting
• Problem: Predict GHI 5-120 min. into the future
• Data:
5 min 10,000 records,60xmin3 sites, 5 min intervals,
inputs: time, weather, satellite, prior GHI
• Performance metric: %RMSE
15 min 90 min
• Also observed value of transfer learning
- no transfer

• BP and Recurrent ANNS - with transfer

30 min 120 min

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Building Energy Management
• Problem: Predict best HVAC action to better
manage the energy used by a large building
• Data: data at 15 min intervals, inputs:
time, weather, satellite, GHI
• Performance metric: Energy use
• ANNs and Non-linear Optimization

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Sales Forecasting
• Problem: Predict hourly sales 1 week in advance
• Data: 4 years of sales data from 3 stores, 5 min
intervals, inputs: date/time, special events,
weather, satellite, prior sales
• Performance metric: MAE in $
• Also observed value of transfer learning
• BP ANNs

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Stream Flow Rate Estimation
• Problem: Predict stream flow rate (m^3/sec)
one day into future using transfer learning
• Data: 30 years of stream flowrate and weather
data (1971-2000), from 4 streams, 1 day
intervals, no auto-regressive terms used
• 17 years train / val, 13 years test
• Performance metric: MAE in m^3/sec
• BP ANNs using a windowing approach

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Stream Flow Rate Estimation
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MAE (m^3/s)
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0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Years of Data Transfered

No Transfer Wilmot Sharpe Sharpe & Wilmot Shubenacadie

x = weather data

f(x) = flow rate

Stream flow rate prediction [Lisa Gaudette, 2006]

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Aquifer Recharge Prediction
• Problem: Predict well levels based on weather
• Data: 30 yrs of weather (1971-2000), stream
flow & well level; 17 yrs train / val, 13 yrs test
• Performance metric: MAE, 5 days in advance
• Interested in value of transfer learning
• Mulitple Task Learning ANNs

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Cantelope Melon Yield
• Problem: Predict melon yield up to 14 days
• Data: 6 years of melon harvest data (2007-
2013), inputs: date, prior weather, prior
harvest, high resolution weather forecast
• Performance metric: RMSE accum. melons
• BP and Recurrent ANNs

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Cantelope Melon Yield
Field Cameras

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Cantelope Melon Yield
Data Preparation

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Cantelope Melon Yield
• Approach: build a model that predicts tomorrows
accumulated yield
• Repeatly use model 14 times (days) using mix of prior and
forecasted weather and accumulated yield as input

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Cantelope Melon Yield
Predicted
Actual
Upper error bound
Lower error bound

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Cantelope Melon Yield
Weather forecast A
Weather forecast B

Actual weather

RMSE of model for

each of the 14 days
average over the
2014 season

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UAV Image Classification
• Problem: Classify relevant objects in UAV
field images: bareground, weeds,
investations
• Data: Mosaics of RGB and Near Infrared
(NIRGB) images (up to 1B B pixels)
capture by a drone flying over a blueberry
field
• Performance metric: Sensitivity and
specificity of pixels by object class
• Appoach: Random Forest and
DBN models (semi-supervised)

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 UAV Image Classification

Use Case:
• Classifying crop
versus
bareground
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UAV Image Classification

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UAV Image Classification

Use Case:
• classifying
weeds in NDVI = Normalized
UAV images Difference Vegetation
Index

Goldenrod weed
Classification

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Estimage – Estimating
Things from Images
• Problem: Count relevant objects in an
image: pints of blueberries, baskets of
grapes, bins of apples, logs,
• Data: Photos from a smart phone
• Performance metric: MSE over pixels,
MAE over count

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Estimage – Estimating
Things from Images
• Problem: Count relevant objects in an
imgae: pints of blueberries, baskets of
grapes, bins of apples, logs,
• Data: Photos from a smart phone
• Performance metric: MSE over pixels,
MAE over count
• Appoaches:
• Random Forests
• Convolution Neural Networks
• Convolution-Deconvolution Neural Networks

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Estimage – Estimating
Things from Images
• Problem: Count relevant objects in an
imgae: pints of blueberries, baskets of
grapes, bins of apples, logs,
• Data: Photos from a smart phone
• Performance metric: MSE over pixels,
MAE over count
• Appoaches:
• Random Forests
• Convolution Neural Networks
• Convolution-Deconvolution Neural Networks

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Estimage – Estimating
Things from Images
• Problem: Count relevant objects in an
imgae: pints of blueberries, baskets of
grapes, bins of apples, logs,
• Data: Photos from a smart phone
• Performance metric: MSE over pixels,
MAE over count
• Appoaches:
• Random Forests
• Convolution Neural Networks
• Convolution-Deconvolution Neural Networks

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Summary
• There are wealth of problems in the area
spatio-temporal forecasting and classification
• Recent develpoments in deep learning and
recurrent neural networks (LSTM, GRU)
provide exciting possibilities

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Thank You

• Email: danny.silver@acadiau.ca
• Webpage: aida.acadiau.ca

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