MERRAMax Automated feature selection

Overview

Development stage

In development or acquisitionSource: a) Pre-deployment – The use case is in a development or acquisition status.

High-impact designation

Not high-impactSource: c) Not high-impact

Impact justification

Not reported

Start date

Not reported

Withheld from public reporting

NoSource: a) No

Mission

Topic area

Science

Operational functions

No function tag matched Derived by keyword rules; see methodology

Problem the AI is intended to solve

There is growing interest in using Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-class climate model outputs in ecological research. These models provide realistic, global representations of the climate system, projections for hundreds of variables (including Essential Climate Variables), and combine observations from an array of satellite, airborne, and in-situ sensors. Unfortunately, direct use of this important class of data has been limited due to the large size and complexity of model output collections, internal file complexity, and limited means for dynamically creating derived products of interest. To address these limitations, we have developed an AI-based stochastic convergence technology, called MERRA/Max, that combines HPC and Princeton's Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) software to rapidly subset and identify potential drivers of change among the hundreds of variables in a climate model output collection. MERRA/Max reduces dimensionality by iteratively drawing on MaxEnt's capacity for feature selection to winnow randomly selected climate variables until a stable set of predictors is found. Preliminary work focuses on the MERRA reanalysis, a product of NASA's GEOS-5 modeling framework. At 1 petabyte in size, MERRA comprises over 700 climate variables and spans 1970 to the present at high temporal resolution. We evaluated MERRA/Max by modeling the bioclimatic envelope of Cassin's Sparrow using MERRA and BioClim variables.

Expected benefits

MERRAMax Automated feature selection

System outputs

Predictions

Technology

AI classification

Classical / predictive MLSource: Classical/Predictive Machine Learning: Models trained on data to make predictions or classifications based on identified patterns or relatio…

System name(s)

Not reported

Custom-developed code

Not reported

Public source code

Not reported

Sourcing

How it was built

Not reported

Vendor (as reported)

Not reported

Vendors (standardized)

None on the standard list

A vendor is the supplier named by the agency. It does not identify the underlying model or AI technology.

Data and privacy

Involves PII

Not reported

Privacy Impact Assessment

Not reported

Authorization to Operate

Not reported

Demographic features

Not reported

Training and evaluation data

Not reported

Federal Data Catalog

Not reported

Governance

0 of 8 minimum-practice questions answered. A blank answer means the agency reported nothing; it does not mean the practice is absent.

Potential impacts and how they were identified

Not reported