# Using Neural Networks for Data Cleaning in Weather Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15027 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15027/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Learning from Noisy Labels with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08199/) (2020)
- [Deep Self-Learning From Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02160/) (2019)
- [Flood Prediction Using Machine Learning Models: Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02781/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In climate science, we often want to compare across different datasets. Difficulties can arise in doing this due to inevitable mismatches that arise between observational and reanalysis data, or even between different reanalyses. This misalignment can raise problems for any work that seeks to make inferences about one dataset from another. We considered tropical cyclone location as an example task with one dataset providing atmospheric conditions (ERA5) and another providing storm tracks (IBTrACS). We found that while the examples often aligned well, there were a considerable proportion (around 25%) which were not well aligned. We trained a neural network to map from the wind field to the storm location; in this setting misalignment in the datasets appears as "label noise" (i.e. the labelled storm location does not correspond to the underlying wind field). We found that this neural network trained only on the often noisy labels from IBTrACS had a denoising effect, and performed better than the IBTrACS labels themselves, as measured by human preferences. Remarkably, this even held true for training points, on which we might have expected the network to overfit to the IBTrACS predictions.
