Towards Explainable Weather Forecasting Through FastLAS

Weather forecasting is important for saving lives, protecting property, and supporting economic activities. It provides timely warnings for severe weather, improves agricultural planning, and aids in disaster management. Neural networks and deep learning methods can achieve impressive accuracy in weather prediction, but their black-box nature lacks in explainability. To address this limitation, we investigated the potential of FastLAS, an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) framework, to produce reliable and, more important, explainable weather predictions. FastLAS learns ASP programs whose syntax and structural semantics resemble natural human language, making them easily understandable and interpretable by humans. The supportedness of stable models allows a clear explanation of the predictions. Our empirical evaluation on data from an Italian weather forecasting center shows that our approach is capable of learning predictive models from small dataset (a few samples instead of the thousands needed by neural networks) achieving an accuracy higher than statistical machine learning base lines.