Bayesian Network-Informed Conditional Random Forests for Probabilistic
Multisite Downscaling of Precipitation Occurrence
Abstract
This work presents Bayesian network-informed conditional random forests
(BNICRF), a novel multiresponse classification technique able to
downscale the joint probability distribution of precipitation occurrence
at a set of geographical locations of interest from large-scale
predictors. BNICRFs combine a Bayesian network, which provides a
description of the multisite/spatial dependence structure of the target
locations; with an ensemble of conditional random forests, which extract
the relevant information from the large-scale predictors to produce
accurate probabilistic predictions. This work extends two previous
articles that explored Bayesian networks (Legasa & Gutiérrez, 2020) and
random forests (Legasa et al., 2022) in the context of statistical
climate downscaling. Building on the experimental and validation
framework proposed in the experiment 1c of the COST action VALUE (the
largest, most exhaustive intercomparison study of statistical
downscaling methods to date) and under the perfect prognosis approach,
we thoroughly assess the performance of the proposed methodology
focusing on its capability to reproduce several multisite and
single-site statistics of the observed series. BNICRFs accurately
capture the relevant spatial relationships while keeping the same
single-site predictive performance than both single-site random forests
and a Generalized Linear Model that exhibited a good performance in
VALUE. Moreover, we compare BNICRFs against a robust multisite
methodology proposed in Chandler (2020), obtaining better predictive
capability while keeping similar spatial performance. Since the assessed
models still underestimate autocorrelation, we also propose a
straightforward extension of BNICRFs that incorporates the temporal
structure at each location of interest able to produce both temporarily
and spatially realistic precipitation occurrence fields