How Warm Is the Pacific at This Buoy?
From the buoy's position, the date, the winds and the humidity, what is the sea surface temperature? Buoys fail and leave gaps, and El Niño studies need a complete record.
The table
Readings from moored buoys across the equatorial Pacific, with location, date, winds and humidity and the sea surface temperature. It's in Welt's research catalogue as El Nino Equatorial Pacific Buoy Readings, 178,080 rows by 11 columns, licensed CC BY 4.0. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.90. At 178,080 rows and 10 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 8,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.
Walkthrough
Load it from the catalogue
Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.
import pandas as pd from welt import Client with Client() as client: item = client.research_datasets(q="El Nino buoy", limit=1)["items"][0] info = client.research_dataset(item["id"]) data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"]) target = info["targets"][0] target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)Pick the rows
Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 8,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.
known = data.dropna(subset=[target]) new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1) table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(8000, random_state=7)Compare the models and predict
The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. RMSE and MAE are average errors in the target's own units, so lower is better. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.
with Client() as client: evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="regression", seed=7, models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"]) model = evaluation.fit() print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "rmse_mean", "mae_mean"]]) features = new_rows.drop(columns=target) print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features)}))
What you get
Try it
Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "El Nino buoy", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".
Open with
- Type
- Use case
- Area
- Climate
- Question
- How Warm Is the Pacific at This Buoy?
- Model
- TabICLv2, Kumo Tabular Medium
- Data
- El Nino Equatorial Pacific Buoy Readings, 178,080 rows
- For
- Climate scientists and oceanographers
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0