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Coupling the Causal Inference and Informer Networks for Short-term Forecasting in Irrigation Water Usage

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Abstract

Precise and reliable irrigation water use (IWU) prediction is beneficial for irrigation district reservoirs interaction and water resources management. However, existing methods face the challenges of high prediction errors at extreme points and accumulative error problem. Meanwhile, ignoring the effects of spurious relationships are among the driving factors on prediction results. This study introduces the Peter and Clark Momentary Conditional Independence (PCMCI) causal inference method to analyze driving factors. The causal inference results of PCMCI are taken as input to the IWU prediction model. This investigation constructs six IWU forecasting models, including the Informer neural network, long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, attention-based LSTM network, the Prophet model, random forest model, and seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA). The performance of these six models and their variants are evaluated and compared by the long-term month IWU data series of the Zhanghe irrigation area of China. The results show that the Informer model based on self-attention mechanism is more advantageous than others. The PCMCI method can overcome the spurious relationships, and contribute to a clearer understanding of physical mechanisms, as compared to the correlation analysis. Combined with the dynamic time warping barycenter averaging (DBA) data augmentation method, the proposed DBA-PCMCI-Informer method can reduce the prediction errors at extreme points, and improve the IWU forecasting accuracy. This approach alleviates the accumulative error problem, enabling high accuracy even in multistep prediction.

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Data Availability

Available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

Abbreviations

\(A_t\) :

Actual value

\(D_O\) :

Original dataset

\(D_{OE}\) :

Test dataset

\(D_{OT}\) :

Original training set

\(D_T\) :

Training dataset MAMP

\(F_t\) :

Forecast value

X :

Variable X in the dataset

\(\bar{X}\) :

Mean value of variable X in the data set

Y :

Variable Y in the dataset

\(X_t\) :

Potential time-relevant system

\(P(X_t^j)\) :

The parents of causality of \(X_t\)

\(\hat{P}(X_t^j)\) :

The preliminary parents

S :

The strongest p parents in the \(\hat{P}(X_t^j)\) (a superset)

\(\eta _t^j\) :

The mutually independent dynamical noise

\(\tau\) :

The time delays

\(\not \! \perp \!\!\! \perp\) :

Conditions not independent

\(\perp \!\!\! \perp\) :

Condition independent

\(\rightarrow\) :

The causal link pointers

Adam:

Adaptive Moment Estimation optimizer

AIC:

Akaike Information Criterion

AP:

Atmospheric Pressure

CA:

Canola Area

CMR:

Cumulative Monthly Rainfall

CMSH:

Cumulative Monthly Sunshine Hours

CP:

Canola Price

CRP:

Crop Production

CY:

Canola Yield

DBA:

Dynamic time warping Barycenter Averaging

DL:

Deep Learning

ELU:

Exponential Linear Unit

GP:

Grain Prices

HUM:

Humidity

IWU:

Irrigation Water Use

LSTM:

Long-Short Term Memory

LSTMa:

LSTM with Attention Mechanism

MAE:

Mean Absolute Error

MAMP:

Maximum Monthly Pressure

MARH:

Monthly Average Relative Humidity

MAT:

Monthly Average Temperature

MCI:

Momentary Conditional Independence

MIMP:

Minimum Monthly Pressure

ML:

Machine Learning

MMAT:

Monthly Maximum Temperature

MMH:

Monthly Minimum Humidity

MMIT:

Monthly Minimum Temperature

MMP:

Monthly Mean air Pressure

MSE:

Mean Square Error

PCMCI:

Peter and Clark Momentary Conditional Independence

PLS:

Planting Structure

PRE:

Precipitation

NSE:

Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency

RA:

Rice Area

ReLU:

Rectified Linear Unit

RF:

Random Forest

RMSE:

Root Mean Square Error

RNN:

Recurrent Neural Network

RP:

Rice Price

RY:

Rice Yield

SARIMA:

Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average

SH:

Sunshine Hours

sMAPE:

symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error

TEM:

Temperature

WA:

Wheat Area

WP:

Wheat Price

WY:

Wheat Yield

ZID:

Zhanghe Irrigation District

References

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers and the editors for their valuable suggestions and contributions, which significantly helped to improve this article. The authors would like to thank Jakob Runge for sharing their PCMCI code at https://github.com/jakobrunge/ tigra mite, and Haoyi Zhou for sharing their Informer code at https://github.com/zhouha oyi/Informer2020.

Funding

The research project was financially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U21A20156) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (52279042).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

Liangfeng Zou: conceptualization, methodology, software, formal analysis, resources, writing of the original draft; Yuanyuan Zha: conceptualization, funding acquisition, reviewing and editing; Yuqing Diao: software, formal analysis; Chi Tang: data curation; Wenquan Gu: reviewing and editing; Dongguo Shao: resources, supervision, funding acquisition, reviewing and editing.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yuanyuan Zha or Dongguo Shao.

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The authors have no interests to disclose.

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Highlights

• Introducing the Peter and Clark Momentary Conditional Independence (PCMCI) to analyze driving factors.

• Building Informer networks to forecast irrigation water use (IWU).

• Proposing a novel IWU forecast method and proving its validity by a real case.

• The proposed approach can improve accuracy by 17.6%-72.1%.

• The PCMCI method can eliminate spurious relationships effectively.

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Zou, L., Zha, Y., Diao, Y. et al. Coupling the Causal Inference and Informer Networks for Short-term Forecasting in Irrigation Water Usage. Water Resour Manage 37, 427–449 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-022-03381-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-022-03381-0

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