Self-clustered GAN for precipitation nowcasting

Abstract This paper proposes a novel GAN framework with self-clustering approach for precipitation nowcasting (ClusterCast). Previous studies have primarily captured the motion vector using only a single latent space, making the models difficult to adapt to disparate space-time distribution of precipitation. Environmental factors (e.g., regional characteristics and precipitation scale) have an impact on precipitation systems and can cause non-stationary distribution. To tackle this problem, our key idea is to train a generator network to predict future radar frames by learning a sub-network that automatically labels precipitation types from a generative model. The training process consists of (i) clustering the hierarchical features derived from the generator stem using a sub-network and (ii) predicting future radar frames according to the self-supervised labels, enabling heterogeneous latent representation. Additionally, we attempt an ensemble forecast that prescribes random perturbations to improve performance. With the flexibility of representation learning, ClusterCast enables the model to learn precipitation distribution more accurately. Results indicate that our method generates non-blurry future frames by preventing mode collapse, and the proposed method demonstrates robustness across various precipitation scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms four benchmarks on a 2-h prediction basis with a mean squared error (MSE) of 8.9% on unseen datasets.