An Advanced Artificial Intelligence System for Investigating Tropical Cyclone Rapid Intensification with the SHIPS Database

Currently, most tropical cyclone (TC) rapid intensification (RI) prediction studies are conducted based on a subset of the SHIPS database using a relatively simple model structure. However, variables (features) in the SHIPS database are built upon human expertise in TC intensity studies based on hard and subjective thresholds, and they should be explored thoroughly to make full use of the expertise. Based on the complete SHIPS data, this study constructs a complicated artificial intelligence (AI) system that handles feature engineering and selection, imbalance, prediction, and hyper parameter-tuning, simultaneously. The complicated AI system is used to further improve the performance of the current studies in RI prediction, and to identify other essential SHIPS variables that are ignored by previous studies with variable importance scores. The results outperform most of the earlier studies by approximately 21–50% on POD (Probability Of Detection) with reduced FAR (False Alarm Rate). This study built a baseline for future work on new predictor identification with more complicated AI techniques.