arXiv:2601.17647cs.LGcs.AI2026-01中稿 · KDD

用物理知识引导因果模型,精准分析海表高对海冰厚度的影响。

Knowledge-Guided Time-Varying Causal Inference for Arctic Sea Ice Dynamics

  • 基于物理关系生成随时间变化的连续处理变量,提升因果推断合理性。
  • 在模拟数据上,预测误差比现有方法低,验证了模型有效性。
  • 适合气候建模、极地动力学研究者,尤其关注因果分析与物理约束结合者。

量化海冰厚度与海表高度(SSH)之间的因果关系,对于理解极地气候动力机制至关重要。传统深度学习模型在气候场景中常因时变混杂因子和缺乏物理约束而难以准确估计处理效应。为此,我们提出知识引导因果模型变分自编码器(KGCM-VAE),用于量化SSH对海冰厚度的影响。该框架利用已知的SSH与表面速度之间的物理关系,生成具有物理解释的、随时间动态变化的连续处理变量,每个时间步的处理值均可独立变化。模型还引入最大均值差异(MMD)以平衡潜在空间中的处理组与对照组分布,缓解观测到的混杂偏差。通过合成数据评估,模型在假设性SSH强迫下的海冰厚度响应预测中表现出更低的预测误差平方根(PEHE),优于当前先进基线。消融实验进一步证实,MMD持续提升了处理效应估计性能。此外,我们在真实案例中研究了海冰厚度对SSH强迫的敏感性,并与现有物理模型结果进行对比验证。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Quantifying the causal relationship between sea ice thickness and sea surface height (SSH) is essential for understanding the mechanisms driving polar climate dynamics. Conventional deep learning models often struggle with treatment effect estimation in climate settings due to time-varying confounding and the lack of physical constraints. To address these challenges, we propose the Knowledge-Guided Causal Model Variational Autoencoder (KGCM-VAE) to quantify the effect of SSH on sea ice thickness. The framework leverages established physical relationships between SSH and surface velocity to generate physically grounded, time-varying continuous treatments, where each treatment value can change at every time step within a sequence. The model also incorporates Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to balance treated and control distributions in the latent space, mitigating observed confounding bias. Using synthetic data, we evaluated the model's ability to predict sea ice thickness responses under hypothetical SSH forcing scenarios, demonstrating that KGCM-VAE achieves lower PEHE compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Ablation studies further confirm that MMD consistently enhances treatment effect estimation over the base model. Additionally, we conducted a real-world case study to examine the sensitivity of sea ice thickness to SSH forcing and validate our findings against existing physical modeling results.

因果推断气候建模物理约束时间序列

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。