Description
Causality is a fundamental research topic studying cause-effect relationships among different components of a system and causality study can help explain why the system has certain behaviors. Data-driven causality learning/discovery has been widely studied and applied in many disciplines including climatology and neuroscience. For instance, our study shows ENSO phenomenon causes surface air temperature in many remote areas using a data-driven algorithm, which is consistent with climate models.
There are many state-of-art approaches and applications of solving the causality discovery problem, yet they still face many challenges when they are used to discover causality from the large-scale and complex climate observation and simulation datasets. The three challenges we are addressing include: 1) computing complexity: how to learn/update causality graph from nonlinear or hybrid climate datasets with increasing data size and dimensionality, 2) uncertainty: how to deal with different causality outputs generated by existing causality discovery methods, 3) reproducibility: how to achieve reproducible causality discovery by leveraging cloud computing services.
Projects
- 2021 – 2025: NSF Harnessing Data Revolution (HDR) Institute: Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions (iHARP), National Science Foundation (NSF)
- 2021 – 2023: REU Site: Online Interdisciplinary Big Data Analytics in Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation (NSF)
- 2020 – 2025: CAREER: Big Data Climate Causality Analytics, National Science Foundation (NSF)
- 2017 – 2021: CrossTraining of Researchers in Computing, Applied Mathematics and Atmospheric Sciences using Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Resources, National Science Foundation (NSF)