Data driven approaches to improve understanding of process-based models and decision making

Abstract

This disclosure provides a data-driven and scalable method to discover cause-and-effect relationships in data from natural systems that include sparse data sets. This technique can learn a causal graph from heterogenous data sources by combining embeddings from real data and embeddings from simulated data generated by process-based models. The causal graph is used for what-if analysis in out-of-distribution settings. One application is understanding the factors that affect soil carbon. A causal model created by these techniques can be used to discover cause-and-effect relationships that affect soil carbon. This model has applications such as forecasting soil carbon for a future time point to help inform farm practices. Farm practices, like tilling, may be modified in response to predictions provided by the model.