Accurate Hydrologic Modeling Using Less Information

Abstract

Joint models are a common and important tool in the intersection of machine learning and the physical sciences, particularly in contexts where real-world measurements are scarce. Recent developments in rainfall-runoff modeling, one of the prime challenges in hydrology, show the value of a joint model with shared representation in this important context. However, current state-of-the-art models depend on detailed and reliable attributes characterizing each site to help the model differentiate correctly between the behavior of different sites. This dependency can present a challenge in data-poor regions. In this paper, we show that we can replace the need for such location-specific attributes with a completely data-driven learned embedding, and match previous state-of-the-art results with less information.