Active Learning with Convolutional Gaussian Neural Processes for Environmental Sensor Placement

Deploying environmental measurement stations can be a costly and time-consuming procedure, especially in remote regions that are difficult to access, such as Antarctica. Therefore, it is crucial that sensors are placed as efficiently as possible, maximising the informativeness of their measurements. This can be tackled by fitting a probabilistic model to existing data and identifying placements that would maximally reduce the model’s uncertainty. The models most widely used for this purpose are Gaussian processes (GPs; Williams and Rasmussen, 2006). However, designing a GP covariance which captures the complex behaviour of non-stationary spatiotemporal data is a difficult task. Further, the computational cost of GPs makes them challenging to scale to large environmental datasets. In this work, we explore using a convolutional Gaussian neural process (ConvGNP; Bruinsma et al., 2021; Markou et al., 2022) to address these issues. A ConvGNP is a meta-learning model that uses neural networks to parameterise a GP predictive. Our model is data-driven, flexible, efficient, and permits multiple input predictors of gridded or scattered modalities. Using simulated surface air temperature fields over Antarctica as ground truth, we show that a ConvGNP significantly outperforms a non-stationary GP baseline in terms of predictive performance. We then use the ConvGNP in an Antarctic sensor placement toy experiment, yielding promising results.