Spatial–Temporal Temperature Forecasting Using Deep-Neural-Network-Based Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Accurate temperature forecasting is critical for various sectors, yet traditional methods struggle with complex atmospheric dynamics. Deep neural networks (DNNs), especially transformer-based DNNs, offer potential advantages, but face challenges with domain adaptation across different geographical regions. We evaluated the effectiveness of DNN-based domain adaptation for daily maximum temperature forecasting in experimental low-resource settings. We used an attention-based transformer deep learning architecture as the core forecasting framework and used kernel mean matching (KMM) for domain adaptation. Domain adaptation significantly improved forecasting accuracy in most experimental settings, thereby mitigating domain differences between source and target regions. Specifically, we observed that domain adaptation is more effective than exclusively training on a small amount of target-domain training data. This study reinforces the potential of using DNNs for temperature forecasting and underscores the benefits of domain adaptation using KMM. It also highlights the need for caution when using small amounts of target-domain data to avoid overfitting. Future research includes investigating strategies to minimize overfitting and to further probe the effect of various factors on model performance.