Synthesis-Style Pre-trained Auto-Correlation Transformer: A Zero-shot
Learner on Long Ionospheric TEC Series Forecasting
Abstract
In this paper, we present a novel approach to improve the accuracy of
TEC prediction through data augmentation. Prior works that adopt various
deep-learning-based approaches suffer from two major problems. First,
from a deep model perspective: LSTM models exhibit low performance on
long-term data dependency, while self-attention-based methods ignore the
temporal nature of time series, which results in an information
utilization bottleneck. Second, the existing TEC actual data is limited
and existing generative models fail to generate sufficient high-quality
datasets. Our work leverages a two-stage deep learning framework for TEC
prediction, stage 1: a time series generative model synthesis of
sufficient data close to real data distribution, and stage 2: an
Anto-correlation-based transformer to model temporal dependencies by
presenting series-wise connections. Experiment on the 2018 TEC testing
benchmark demonstrates that our method improves the accuracy by a large
margin. The models trained on synthetic data had a notably lower RMSE of
1.17 TECU, while the RMSE for the IRI2016 model was 2.88 TECU. Our
results show that the model significantly reduces monthly RMSE,
displaying higher reliability in mid, high, low latitudes. Our model
shows higher reliability and significantly reduces monthly RMSE and
latitude RMSE. However, although our model performs better than IRI2016,
low latitudes RMSE needs improvement, as values are generally above 2.5
TECU. This finding has important implications for the development of
advanced TEC prediction models and highlights the potential of
transformer models trained on synthetic data for a range of applications
in ionospheric research and satellite communication systems.