Dr.-Ing. Anna Krause

Chair of Data Science (Informatik X)
University of Würzburg
Campus Hubland Nord
Emil-Fischer-Straße 50
97074 Würzburg
Germany

Email: anna.krause[at]informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
PGP-Key: Download(E013 7ACA 2DCF 8DAC 5E51 0406 0759 C72A B9A7 510A)

Phone: (+49 931) 31 - 88935

Office: Room 50.03.008 (Institutsgebäude Künstliche Intelligenz)

About Me

I received my Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University Dresden in 2009. In the same year, I joined Prof. Erich Barke's Electronic Design Automation Group at the Institute of Microelectronic Systems at the University of Hannover. I researched methods for automatically generating behavioral models of analog circuits with parameter variations. My thesis is on the adaptation of Support Vector Machines to generate models with interval-valued parameters. I received my doctorate degree from the University of Hannover in 2019. In 2016, I joined Robert Bosch GmbH Corporate Research as a research engineer. I joined the Chair X (Data Science) in 2019 as a post-doctoral researcher, where I am currently leading the Deep Learning for Dynamical Systems Group.

Projects and Research Interests

I am currently doing research in Environmental Sensing and Time Series Analysis. I am interested in furthering methods to enhance existing physics-based models - such as meteorological models, and to further our understanding based on data obtained by sparse and dynamic sensor networks.

Teaching

Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures: WS2020 WS2019
Data Mining: SS2021 SS2020
Seminar Selected Topics in Machine Learning SS2022 WS2022 SS2023
Lecture: Machine Learning for Times Series Analysis and Anomaly Detection WS2023

Activities

Organizer for the workshop "Neuro-Explicit AI and Expert-informed Machine Learning for Engineering and Physical Sciences" at ECMLPKDD2023
PC member for ECMLPKDD 2021, 2022, 2023 (Research Track)
PC member for the MIDAS workshop 2021, 2022
Reviewer for Volkswagen Stiftung

Awards

Best ML Innovation Award: "Deep Learning for Climate Model Output Statistics", Michael Steininger, Daniel Abel, Katrin Ziegler, Anna Krause, Heiko Paeth, Andreas Hotho at Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop at NeurIPS 2020 (link)
Best Student Paper Award: "Evaluating the multi-task learning approach for land use regression modelling of air pollution", Andrzej Dulny, Michael Steininger, Florian Lautenschlager, Anna Krause, Andreas Hotho at FAIML 2020
Best Paper Award: "Financial Fraud Detection with Improved Neural Arithmetic Logic Units" by Daniel Schlör, Markus Ring, Anna Krause, Andreas Hotho on the Fifth Workshop on MIning DAta for financial applicationS Co-Hosted by ECML- PKDD 2020

Publications

2025[ to top ]

Exploring Design Choices for Autoregressive Deep Learning Climate Models. Gallusser, Florian; Hentschel, Simon; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning, International Conference on Learning Representation 2025 (ICLR 2025). 2025.
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@inproceedings{gallusser2025exploring, author = {Gallusser, Florian and Hentschel, Simon and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning, International Conference on Learning Representation 2025 (ICLR 2025)}, keywords = {climate}, title = {Exploring Design Choices for Autoregressive Deep Learning Climate Models}, year = 2025 }

2024[ to top ]

Global Vegetation Modeling With Pre-Trained Weather Transformers. Janetzky, Pascal; Gallusser, Florian; Hentschel, Simon; Hotho, Andreas; Krause, Anna. In Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning, International Conference on Learning Representation 2024 (ICLR 2024). 2024.
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@inproceedings{Janetzky2024, author = {Janetzky, Pascal and Gallusser, Florian and Hentschel, Simon and Hotho, Andreas and Krause, Anna}, booktitle = {Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning, International Conference on Learning Representation 2024 (ICLR 2024)}, keywords = {climate}, title = {Global Vegetation Modeling With Pre-Trained Weather Transformers}, year = 2024 }

2023[ to top ]

Feature relevance XAI in anomaly detection: Reviewing approaches and challenges. Tritscher, Julian; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 6. 2023.
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With complexity of artificial intelligence systems increasing continuously in past years, studies to explain these complex systems have grown in popularity. While much work has focused on explaining artificial intelligence systems in popular domains such as classification and regression, explanations in the area of anomaly detection have only recently received increasing attention from researchers. In particular, explaining singular model decisions of a complex anomaly detector by highlighting which inputs were responsible for a decision, commonly referred to as local post-hoc feature relevance, has lately been studied by several authors. In this paper, we systematically structure these works based on their access to training data and the anomaly detection model, and provide a detailed overview of their operation in the anomaly detection domain. We demonstrate their performance and highlight their limitations in multiple experimental showcases, discussing current challenges and opportunities for future work in feature relevance XAI for anomaly detection.

@article{tritscher2023feature, abstract = {With complexity of artificial intelligence systems increasing continuously in past years, studies to explain these complex systems have grown in popularity. While much work has focused on explaining artificial intelligence systems in popular domains such as classification and regression, explanations in the area of anomaly detection have only recently received increasing attention from researchers. In particular, explaining singular model decisions of a complex anomaly detector by highlighting which inputs were responsible for a decision, commonly referred to as local post-hoc feature relevance, has lately been studied by several authors. In this paper, we systematically structure these works based on their access to training data and the anomaly detection model, and provide a detailed overview of their operation in the anomaly detection domain. We demonstrate their performance and highlight their limitations in multiple experimental showcases, discussing current challenges and opportunities for future work in feature relevance XAI for anomaly detection.}, author = {Tritscher, Julian and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence}, keywords = {xai}, month = {02}, title = {Feature relevance XAI in anomaly detection: Reviewing approaches and challenges}, volume = 6, year = 2023 }
TaylorPDENet: Learning PDEs from non-grid Data. Heinisch, Paul; Dulny, Andrzej; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Workshop on Neuro-Explicit AI and Expert-Informed Machine Learning for Engineering and Physical Sciences at the ECML PKDD 2023. 2023.
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Modeling data obtained from dynamical systems has gained attention in recent years as a challenging task for machine learning models. Previous approaches assume the measurements to be distributed on a grid. However, for real-world applications like weather prediction, the observations are taken from arbitrary locations within the spatial domain. In this paper, we propose TaylorPDENet - a novel machine learning method that is designed to overcome this challenge. Our algorithm uses the multidimensional Taylor expansion of a dynamical system at each observation point to estimate the spatial derivatives to perform predictions. TaylorPDENet is able to accomplish two objectives simultaneously: accurately forecast the evolution of a complex dynamical system and explicitly reconstruct the underlying differential equation describing the system. We evaluate our model on a variety of advection-diffusion equations with different parameters and show that it performs similarly to equivalent approaches on grid-structured data while being able to process unstructured data as well.

@inproceedings{heinisch2023taylorpdenet, abstract = {Modeling data obtained from dynamical systems has gained attention in recent years as a challenging task for machine learning models. Previous approaches assume the measurements to be distributed on a grid. However, for real-world applications like weather prediction, the observations are taken from arbitrary locations within the spatial domain. In this paper, we propose TaylorPDENet - a novel machine learning method that is designed to overcome this challenge. Our algorithm uses the multidimensional Taylor expansion of a dynamical system at each observation point to estimate the spatial derivatives to perform predictions. TaylorPDENet is able to accomplish two objectives simultaneously: accurately forecast the evolution of a complex dynamical system and explicitly reconstruct the underlying differential equation describing the system. We evaluate our model on a variety of advection-diffusion equations with different parameters and show that it performs similarly to equivalent approaches on grid-structured data while being able to process unstructured data as well.}, author = {Heinisch, Paul and Dulny, Andrzej and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {Workshop on Neuro-Explicit AI and Expert-Informed Machine Learning for Engineering and Physical Sciences at the ECML PKDD 2023}, keywords = {pinn}, note = {cite arxiv:2306.14511}, title = {TaylorPDENet: Learning PDEs from non-grid Data}, year = 2023 }
Swarming Detection in Smart Beehives Using Auto Encoders for Audio Data. Janetzky, Pascal; Schaller, Melanie; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In International Conference on Systems, Signals and Image Processing (IWSSIP). 2023.
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@conference{Janetzky2023, author = {Janetzky, Pascal and Schaller, Melanie and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {International Conference on Systems, Signals and Image Processing (IWSSIP)}, keywords = {beescience}, title = {Swarming Detection in Smart Beehives Using Auto Encoders for Audio Data}, year = 2023 }
Automatic Speech Detection on a Smart Beehive’s Raspberry Pi. Janetzky, Pascal; Lissmann, Philipp; Hotho, Andreas; Krause, Anna. In LWDA 2023 - Learning, Knowledge, Data, and Analysis (accepted). 2023.
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@inproceedings{Janetzky2023a, author = {Janetzky, Pascal and Lissmann, Philipp and Hotho, Andreas and Krause, Anna}, booktitle = {LWDA 2023 - Learning, Knowledge, Data, and Analysis (accepted)}, keywords = {speechdetection}, title = {Automatic Speech Detection on a Smart Beehive's Raspberry Pi}, year = 2023 }
ConvMOS: climate model output statistics with deep learning. Steininger, Michael; Abel, Daniel; Ziegler, Katrin; Krause, Anna; Paeth, Heiko; Hotho, Andreas. In Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 37(1), pp. 136–166. 2023.
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Climate models are the tool of choice for scientists researching climate change. Like all models they suffer from errors, particularly systematic and location-specific representation errors. One way to reduce these errors is model output statistics (MOS) where the model output is fitted to observational data with machine learning. In this work, we assess the use of convolutional Deep Learning climate MOS approaches and present the ConvMOS architecture which is specifically designed based on the observation that there are systematic and location-specific errors in the precipitation estimates of climate models. We apply ConvMOS models to the simulated precipitation of the regional climate model REMO, showing that a combination of per-location model parameters for reducing location-specific errors and global model parameters for reducing systematic errors is indeed beneficial for MOS performance. We find that ConvMOS models can reduce errors considerably and perform significantly better than three commonly used MOS approaches and plain ResNet and U-Net models in most cases. Our results show that non-linear MOS models underestimate the number of extreme precipitation events, which we alleviate by training models specialized towards extreme precipitation events with the imbalanced regression method DenseLoss. While we consider climate MOS, we argue that aspects of ConvMOS may also be beneficial in other domains with geospatial data, such as air pollution modeling or weather forecasts.

@article{steininger2023convmos, abstract = {Climate models are the tool of choice for scientists researching climate change. Like all models they suffer from errors, particularly systematic and location-specific representation errors. One way to reduce these errors is model output statistics (MOS) where the model output is fitted to observational data with machine learning. In this work, we assess the use of convolutional Deep Learning climate MOS approaches and present the ConvMOS architecture which is specifically designed based on the observation that there are systematic and location-specific errors in the precipitation estimates of climate models. We apply ConvMOS models to the simulated precipitation of the regional climate model REMO, showing that a combination of per-location model parameters for reducing location-specific errors and global model parameters for reducing systematic errors is indeed beneficial for MOS performance. We find that ConvMOS models can reduce errors considerably and perform significantly better than three commonly used MOS approaches and plain ResNet and U-Net models in most cases. Our results show that non-linear MOS models underestimate the number of extreme precipitation events, which we alleviate by training models specialized towards extreme precipitation events with the imbalanced regression method DenseLoss. While we consider climate MOS, we argue that aspects of ConvMOS may also be beneficial in other domains with geospatial data, such as air pollution modeling or weather forecasts.}, author = {Steininger, Michael and Abel, Daniel and Ziegler, Katrin and Krause, Anna and Paeth, Heiko and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery}, keywords = {ConvMOS}, number = 1, pages = {136–166}, title = {ConvMOS: climate model output statistics with deep learning}, volume = 37, year = 2023 }
Occupational Fraud Detection through Agent-based Data Generation. Tritscher, Julian; Roos, Alexander; Schlör, Daniel; Hotho, Andreas; Krause, Anna. In MIDAS - The 8th Workshop on MIning DAta for financial applicationS at the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practives of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD), accepted. 2023.
- [ BibTeX ]
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@inproceedings{Tritscher2023, author = {Tritscher, Julian and Roos, Alexander and Schlör, Daniel and Hotho, Andreas and Krause, Anna}, booktitle = {MIDAS - The 8th Workshop on MIning DAta for financial applicationS at the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practives of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD), accepted}, keywords = {financialfraud}, title = {Occupational Fraud Detection through Agent-based Data Generation}, year = 2023 }
DynaBench: A benchmark dataset for learning dynamical systems from low-resolution data. Dulny, Andrzej; Hotho, Andreas; Krause, Anna. 2023.
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Previous work on learning physical systems from data has focused on high-resolution grid-structured measurements. However, real-world knowledge of such systems (e.g. weather data) relies on sparsely scattered measuring stations. In this paper, we introduce a novel simulated benchmark dataset, DynaBench, for learning dynamical systems directly from sparsely scattered data without prior knowledge of the equations. The dataset focuses on predicting the evolution of a dynamical system from low-resolution, unstructured measurements. We simulate six different partial differential equations covering a variety of physical systems commonly used in the literature and evaluate several machine learning models, including traditional graph neural networks and point cloud processing models, with the task of predicting the evolution of the system. The proposed benchmark dataset is expected to advance the state of art as an out-of-the-box easy-to-use tool for evaluating models in a setting where only unstructured low-resolution observations are available. The benchmark is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/code-2022-dynabench/.

@misc{dulny2023dynabench, abstract = {Previous work on learning physical systems from data has focused on high-resolution grid-structured measurements. However, real-world knowledge of such systems (e.g. weather data) relies on sparsely scattered measuring stations. In this paper, we introduce a novel simulated benchmark dataset, DynaBench, for learning dynamical systems directly from sparsely scattered data without prior knowledge of the equations. The dataset focuses on predicting the evolution of a dynamical system from low-resolution, unstructured measurements. We simulate six different partial differential equations covering a variety of physical systems commonly used in the literature and evaluate several machine learning models, including traditional graph neural networks and point cloud processing models, with the task of predicting the evolution of the system. The proposed benchmark dataset is expected to advance the state of art as an out-of-the-box easy-to-use tool for evaluating models in a setting where only unstructured low-resolution observations are available. The benchmark is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/code-2022-dynabench/.}, author = {Dulny, Andrzej and Hotho, Andreas and Krause, Anna}, keywords = {benchmark}, note = {cite arxiv:2306.05805}, title = {DynaBench: A benchmark dataset for learning dynamical systems from low-resolution data}, year = 2023 }

2022[ to top ]

Semi-unsupervised Learning for Time Series Classification. Davidson, Padraig; Steininger, Michael; Huhn, André; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Milets@KDD. arXiv, 2022.
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Time series are ubiquitous and therefore inherently hard to analyze and ultimately to label or cluster. With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its smart devices, data is collected in large amounts any given second. The collected data is rich in information, as one can detect accidents (e.g. cars) in real time, or assess injury/sickness over a given time span (e.g. health devices). Due to its chaotic nature and massive amounts of datapoints, timeseries are hard to label manually. Furthermore new classes within the data could emerge over time (contrary to e.g. handwritten digits), which would require relabeling the data. In this paper we present SuSL4TS, a deep generative Gaussian mixture model for semi-unsupervised learning, to classify time series data. With our approach we can alleviate manual labeling steps, since we can detect sparsely labeled classes (semi-supervised) and identify emerging classes hidden in the data (unsupervised). We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with established time series classification datasets from different domains.

@article{davidson2022semiunsupervised, abstract = {Time series are ubiquitous and therefore inherently hard to analyze and ultimately to label or cluster. With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its smart devices, data is collected in large amounts any given second. The collected data is rich in information, as one can detect accidents (e.g. cars) in real time, or assess injury/sickness over a given time span (e.g. health devices). Due to its chaotic nature and massive amounts of datapoints, timeseries are hard to label manually. Furthermore new classes within the data could emerge over time (contrary to e.g. handwritten digits), which would require relabeling the data. In this paper we present SuSL4TS, a deep generative Gaussian mixture model for semi-unsupervised learning, to classify time series data. With our approach we can alleviate manual labeling steps, since we can detect sparsely labeled classes (semi-supervised) and identify emerging classes hidden in the data (unsupervised). We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with established time series classification datasets from different domains.}, author = {Davidson, Padraig and Steininger, Michael and Huhn, André and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {Milets@KDD}, keywords = {susl}, publisher = {arXiv}, title = {Semi-unsupervised Learning for Time Series Classification}, year = 2022 }
Open ERP System Data For Occupational Fraud Detection. Tritscher, Julian; Gwinner, Fabian; Schlör, Daniel; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. 2022.
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Recent estimates report that companies lose 5% of their revenue to occupational fraud. Since most medium-sized and large companies employ Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to track vast amounts of information regarding their business process, researchers have in the past shown interest in automatically detecting fraud through ERP system data. Current research in this area, however, is hindered by the fact that ERP system data is not publicly available for the development and comparison of fraud detection methods. We therefore endeavour to generate public ERP system data that includes both normal business operation and fraud. We propose a strategy for generating ERP system data through a serious game, model a variety of fraud scenarios in cooperation with auditing experts, and generate data from a simulated make-to-stock production company with multiple research participants. We aggregate the generated data into ready to used datasets for fraud detection in ERP systems, and supply both the raw and aggregated data to the general public to allow for open development and comparison of fraud detection approaches on ERP system data.

@misc{tritscher2022system, abstract = {Recent estimates report that companies lose 5% of their revenue to occupational fraud. Since most medium-sized and large companies employ Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to track vast amounts of information regarding their business process, researchers have in the past shown interest in automatically detecting fraud through ERP system data. Current research in this area, however, is hindered by the fact that ERP system data is not publicly available for the development and comparison of fraud detection methods. We therefore endeavour to generate public ERP system data that includes both normal business operation and fraud. We propose a strategy for generating ERP system data through a serious game, model a variety of fraud scenarios in cooperation with auditing experts, and generate data from a simulated make-to-stock production company with multiple research participants. We aggregate the generated data into ready to used datasets for fraud detection in ERP systems, and supply both the raw and aggregated data to the general public to allow for open development and comparison of fraud detection approaches on ERP system data.}, author = {Tritscher, Julian and Gwinner, Fabian and Schlör, Daniel and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, keywords = {sys:relevantfor:dmir}, note = {cite arxiv:2206.04460}, title = {Open ERP System Data For Occupational Fraud Detection}, year = 2022 }
NeuralPDE: Modelling Dynamical Systems from Data. Dulny, Andrzej; Hotho, Andreas; Krause, Anna. In {KI} 2022: Advances in Artificial Intelligence - 45th German Conference on AI, Trier, Germany, September 19-23, 2022, Proceedings, Vol. 13404 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, R. Bergmann, L. Malburg, S. C. Rodermund, I. J. Timm (eds.), pp. 75–89. Springer, 2022.
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@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/ki/DulnyHK22, author = {Dulny, Andrzej and Hotho, Andreas and Krause, Anna}, booktitle = {{KI} 2022: Advances in Artificial Intelligence - 45th German Conference on AI, Trier, Germany, September 19-23, 2022, Proceedings}, editor = {Bergmann, Ralph and Malburg, Lukas and Rodermund, Stephanie C. and Timm, Ingo J.}, keywords = {research:fundamentals}, pages = {75–89}, publisher = {Springer}, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science}, title = {NeuralPDE: Modelling Dynamical Systems from Data}, volume = 13404, year = 2022 }
Towards Explainable Occupational Fraud Detection. Tritscher, Julian; Schlör, Daniel; Gwinner, Fabian; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2022, Communications in Computer and Information Science(1753), pp. 79–96. 2022.
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@article{tritscher2022towards, author = {Tritscher, Julian and Schlör, Daniel and Gwinner, Fabian and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2022}, keywords = {xai}, number = 1753, pages = {79-96}, title = {Towards Explainable Occupational Fraud Detection}, volume = {Communications in Computer and Information Science}, year = 2022 }
Anomaly Detection in Beehives: An Algorithm Comparison. Davidson, Padraig; Steininger, Michael; Lautenschlager, Florian; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Sensor Networks, A. Ahrens, R. V. Prasad, C. Benavente-Peces, N. Ansari (eds.), pp. 1–20. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2022.
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Sensor-equipped beehives allow monitoring the living conditions of bees. Machine learning models can use the data of such hives to learn behavioral patterns and find anomalous events. One type of event that is of particular interest to apiarists for economical reasons is bee swarming. Other events of interest are behavioral anomalies from illness and technical anomalies, e.g. sensor failure. Beekeepers can be supported by suitable machine learning models which can detect these events.

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-031-17718-7_1, abstract = {Sensor-equipped beehives allow monitoring the living conditions of bees. Machine learning models can use the data of such hives to learn behavioral patterns and find anomalous events. One type of event that is of particular interest to apiarists for economical reasons is bee swarming. Other events of interest are behavioral anomalies from illness and technical anomalies, e.g. sensor failure. Beekeepers can be supported by suitable machine learning models which can detect these events.}, address = {Cham}, author = {Davidson, Padraig and Steininger, Michael and Lautenschlager, Florian and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {Sensor Networks}, editor = {Ahrens, Andreas and Prasad, RangaRao Venkatesha and Benavente-Peces, C{\'e}sar and Ansari, Nirwan}, keywords = {precisionbeekeeping}, pages = {1–20}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, title = {Anomaly Detection in Beehives: An Algorithm Comparison}, year = 2022 }
ConvMOS: Climate Model Output Statistics with Deep Learning. Steininger, Michael; Abel, Daniel; Ziegler, Katrin; Krause, Anna; Paeth, Heiko; Hotho, Andreas. In Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, P. Cellier; K. Dembczynski; A. Zimmermann; E. Devijver (eds.). Springer, 2022.
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Climate models are the tool of choice for scientists researching climate change. Like all models they suffer from errors, particularly systematic and location-specific representation errors. One way to reduce these errors is model output statistics (MOS) where the model output is fitted to observational data with machine learning. In this work, we assess the use of convolutional Deep Learning climate MOS approaches and present the ConvMOS architecture which is specifically designed based on the observation that there are systematic and location-specific errors in the precipitation estimates of climate models. We apply ConvMOS models to the simulated precipitation of the regional climate model REMO, showing that a combination of per-location model parameters for reducing location-specific errors and global model parameters for reducing systematic errors is indeed beneficial for MOS performance. We find that ConvMOS models can reduce errors considerably and perform significantly better than three commonly used MOS approaches and plain ResNet and U-Net models in most cases. Our results show that non-linear MOS models underestimate the number of extreme precipitation events, which we alleviate by training models specialized towards extreme precipitation events with the imbalanced regression method DenseLoss. While we consider climate MOS, we argue that aspects of ConvMOS may also be beneficial in other domains with geospatial data, such as air pollution modeling or weather forecasts.

@article{steininger2022convmos, abstract = {Climate models are the tool of choice for scientists researching climate change. Like all models they suffer from errors, particularly systematic and location-specific representation errors. One way to reduce these errors is model output statistics (MOS) where the model output is fitted to observational data with machine learning. In this work, we assess the use of convolutional Deep Learning climate MOS approaches and present the ConvMOS architecture which is specifically designed based on the observation that there are systematic and location-specific errors in the precipitation estimates of climate models. We apply ConvMOS models to the simulated precipitation of the regional climate model REMO, showing that a combination of per-location model parameters for reducing location-specific errors and global model parameters for reducing systematic errors is indeed beneficial for MOS performance. We find that ConvMOS models can reduce errors considerably and perform significantly better than three commonly used MOS approaches and plain ResNet and U-Net models in most cases. Our results show that non-linear MOS models underestimate the number of extreme precipitation events, which we alleviate by training models specialized towards extreme precipitation events with the imbalanced regression method DenseLoss. While we consider climate MOS, we argue that aspects of ConvMOS may also be beneficial in other domains with geospatial data, such as air pollution modeling or weather forecasts.}, author = {Steininger, Michael and Abel, Daniel and Ziegler, Katrin and Krause, Anna and Paeth, Heiko and Hotho, Andreas}, editor = {Cellier, Peggy and Dembczynski, Krzysztof and Zimmermann, Albrecht and Devijver, Emilie}, journal = {Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery}, keywords = {climate}, month = 10, publisher = {Springer}, title = {ConvMOS: Climate Model Output Statistics with Deep Learning}, year = 2022 }

2021[ to top ]

Evaluating the multi-task learning approach for land use regression modelling of air pollution. Dulny, Andrzej; Steininger, Michael; Lautenschlager, Florian; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1834(1), p. 012004. {IOP} Publishing, 2021.
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Air pollution has been linked to several health problems including heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. Modelling and analyzing this dependency requires reliable and accurate air pollutant measurements collected by stationary air monitoring stations. However, usually only a low number of such stations are present within a single city. To retrieve pollution concentrations for unmeasured locations, researchers rely on land use regression (LUR) models. Those models are typically developed for one pollutant only. However, as results in different areas have shown, modelling several related output variables through multi-task learning can improve the prediction results of the models significantly. In this work, we compared prediction results from single-task and multi-task learning multilayer perceptron models on measurements taken from the OpenSense dataset and the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory dataset. LUR features were generated from OpenStreetMap using OpenLUR and used to train hard parameter sharing multilayer perceptron models. The results show multi-task learning with sufficient data significantly improves the performance of a LUR model.

@article{dulny2021evaluating, abstract = {Air pollution has been linked to several health problems including heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. Modelling and analyzing this dependency requires reliable and accurate air pollutant measurements collected by stationary air monitoring stations. However, usually only a low number of such stations are present within a single city. To retrieve pollution concentrations for unmeasured locations, researchers rely on land use regression (LUR) models. Those models are typically developed for one pollutant only. However, as results in different areas have shown, modelling several related output variables through multi-task learning can improve the prediction results of the models significantly. In this work, we compared prediction results from single-task and multi-task learning multilayer perceptron models on measurements taken from the OpenSense dataset and the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory dataset. LUR features were generated from OpenStreetMap using OpenLUR and used to train hard parameter sharing multilayer perceptron models. The results show multi-task learning with sufficient data significantly improves the performance of a LUR model.}, author = {Dulny, Andrzej and Steininger, Michael and Lautenschlager, Florian and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {Journal of Physics: Conference Series}, keywords = {lur}, month = {03}, number = 1, organization = {IOP Publishing}, pages = {012004}, publisher = {{IOP} Publishing}, title = {Evaluating the multi-task learning approach for land use regression modelling of air pollution}, volume = 1834, year = 2021 }
NeuralPDE: Modelling Dynamical Systems from Data. Dulny, Andrzej; Hotho, Andreas; Krause, Anna. 2021.
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Many physical processes such as weather phenomena or fluid mechanics are governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). Modelling such dynamical systems using Neural Networks is an emerging research field. However, current methods are restricted in various ways: they require prior knowledge about the governing equations, and are limited to linear or first-order equations. In this work we propose NeuralPDE, a model which combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with differentiable ODE solvers to model dynamical systems. We show that the Method of Lines used in standard PDE solvers can be represented using convolutions which makes CNNs the natural choice to parametrize arbitrary PDE dynamics. Our model can be applied to any data without requiring any prior knowledge about the governing PDE. We evaluate NeuralPDE on datasets generated by solving a wide variety of PDEs, covering higher orders, non-linear equations and multiple spatial dimensions.

@misc{dulny2021neuralpde, abstract = {Many physical processes such as weather phenomena or fluid mechanics are governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). Modelling such dynamical systems using Neural Networks is an emerging research field. However, current methods are restricted in various ways: they require prior knowledge about the governing equations, and are limited to linear or first-order equations. In this work we propose NeuralPDE, a model which combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with differentiable ODE solvers to model dynamical systems. We show that the Method of Lines used in standard PDE solvers can be represented using convolutions which makes CNNs the natural choice to parametrize arbitrary PDE dynamics. Our model can be applied to any data without requiring any prior knowledge about the governing PDE. We evaluate NeuralPDE on datasets generated by solving a wide variety of PDEs, covering higher orders, non-linear equations and multiple spatial dimensions.}, author = {Dulny, Andrzej and Hotho, Andreas and Krause, Anna}, keywords = {research:fundamentals}, note = {cite arxiv:2111.07671}, title = {NeuralPDE: Modelling Dynamical Systems from Data}, year = 2021 }
DETECTING PRESENCE OF SPEECH IN ACOUSTIC DATA OBTAINED FROM BEEHIVES. Janetzky, Pascal; Davidson, Padraig; Steininger, Michael; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In DCASE Workshop. 2021.
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@article{janetzkydetecting, author = {Janetzky, Pascal and Davidson, Padraig and Steininger, Michael and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {DCASE Workshop}, keywords = {bees}, title = {DETECTING PRESENCE OF SPEECH IN ACOUSTIC DATA OBTAINED FROM BEEHIVES}, year = 2021 }
Density-based weighting for imbalanced regression. Steininger, Michael; Kobs, Konstantin; Davidson, Padraig; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Machine Learning, 110(8), A. Appice; S. Escalera; J. A. Gamez; H. Trautmann (eds.), pp. 2187–2211. 2021.
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In many real world settings,imbalanced data impedes model performance of learning algorithms, like neural networks, mostly for rare cases. This is especially problematic for tasks focusing on these rare occurrences. For example, when estimating precipitation, extreme rainfall events are scarce but important considering their potential consequences. While there are numerous well studied solutions for classification settings, most of them cannot be applied to regression easily. Of the few solutions for regression tasks, barely any have explored cost-sensitive learning which is known to have advantages compared to sampling-based methods in classification tasks. In this work, we propose a sample weighting approach for imbalanced regression datasets called DenseWeight and a cost-sensitive learning approach for neural network regression with imbalanced data called DenseLoss based on our weighting scheme. DenseWeight weights data points according to their target value rarities through kernel density estimation (KDE). DenseLoss adjusts each data point’s influence on the loss according to DenseWeight, giving rare data points more influence on modeltraining compared to common data points. We show on multiple differently distributed datasets that DenseLoss significantly improves model performance for rare data points through its density-based weighting scheme. Additionally, we compare DenseLoss to the state-of-the-art method SMOGN, finding that our method mostly yields better performance. Our approach provides more control over model training as it enables us to actively decide on the trade-off between focusing on common or rare cases through a single hyperparameter, allowing the training of better models for rare data points.

@article{steininger2021densitybased, abstract = {In many real world settings,imbalanced data impedes model performance of learning algorithms, like neural networks, mostly for rare cases. This is especially problematic for tasks focusing on these rare occurrences. For example, when estimating precipitation, extreme rainfall events are scarce but important considering their potential consequences. While there are numerous well studied solutions for classification settings, most of them cannot be applied to regression easily. Of the few solutions for regression tasks, barely any have explored cost-sensitive learning which is known to have advantages compared to sampling-based methods in classification tasks. In this work, we propose a sample weighting approach for imbalanced regression datasets called DenseWeight and a cost-sensitive learning approach for neural network regression with imbalanced data called DenseLoss based on our weighting scheme. DenseWeight weights data points according to their target value rarities through kernel density estimation (KDE). DenseLoss adjusts each data point’s influence on the loss according to DenseWeight, giving rare data points more influence on modeltraining compared to common data points. We show on multiple differently distributed datasets that DenseLoss significantly improves model performance for rare data points through its density-based weighting scheme. Additionally, we compare DenseLoss to the state-of-the-art method SMOGN, finding that our method mostly yields better performance. Our approach provides more control over model training as it enables us to actively decide on the trade-off between focusing on common or rare cases through a single hyperparameter, allowing the training of better models for rare data points.}, author = {Steininger, Michael and Kobs, Konstantin and Davidson, Padraig and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, editor = {Appice, Annalisa and Escalera, Sergio and Gamez, Jose A. and Trautmann, Heike}, journal = {Machine Learning}, keywords = {density}, number = 8, pages = {2187-2211}, title = {Density-based weighting for imbalanced regression}, volume = 110, year = 2021 }
Semi-Supervised Learning for Grain Size Distribution Interpolation. Kobs, Konstantin; Schäfer, Christian; Steininger, Michael; Krause, Anna; Baumhauer, Roland; Paeth, Heiko; Hotho, Andreas. In Pattern Recognition. ICPR International Workshops and Challenges: Virtual Event, January 10--15, 2021, Proceedings, Part VI, pp. 34–44. Springer International Publishing, 2021.
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@inproceedings{kobs2021semi, author = {Kobs, Konstantin and Schäfer, Christian and Steininger, Michael and Krause, Anna and Baumhauer, Roland and Paeth, Heiko and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {Pattern Recognition. ICPR International Workshops and Challenges: Virtual Event, January 10–15, 2021, Proceedings, Part VI}, keywords = {soil}, organization = {Springer International Publishing}, pages = {34–44}, title = {Semi-Supervised Learning for Grain Size Distribution Interpolation}, year = 2021 }
Semi-unsupervised Learning: An In-depth Parameter Analysis. Davidson, Padraig; Buckermann, Florian; Steininger, Michael; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In KI 2021: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, S. Edelkamp, R. M{ö}ller, E. Rueckert (eds.), pp. 51–66. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2021.
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Creating datasets for supervised learning is a very challenging and expensive task, in which each input example has to be annotated with its expected output (e.g. object class). By combining unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, semi-unsupervised learning proposes a new paradigm for partially labeled datasets with additional unknown classes. In this paper we focus on a better understanding of this new learning paradigm and analyze the impact of the amount of labeled data, the number of augmented classes and the selection of hidden classes on the quality of prediction. Especially the number of augmented classes highly influences classification accuracy, which needs tuning for each dataset, since too few and too many augmented classes are detrimental to classifier performance. We also show that we can improve results on a large variety of datasets when using convolutional networks as feature extractors while applying output driven entropy regularization instead of a simple weight based L2 norm.

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-87626-5_5, abstract = {Creating datasets for supervised learning is a very challenging and expensive task, in which each input example has to be annotated with its expected output (e.g. object class). By combining unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, semi-unsupervised learning proposes a new paradigm for partially labeled datasets with additional unknown classes. In this paper we focus on a better understanding of this new learning paradigm and analyze the impact of the amount of labeled data, the number of augmented classes and the selection of hidden classes on the quality of prediction. Especially the number of augmented classes highly influences classification accuracy, which needs tuning for each dataset, since too few and too many augmented classes are detrimental to classifier performance. We also show that we can improve results on a large variety of datasets when using convolutional networks as feature extractors while applying output driven entropy regularization instead of a simple weight based L2 norm.}, address = {Cham}, author = {Davidson, Padraig and Buckermann, Florian and Steininger, Michael and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {KI 2021: Advances in Artificial Intelligence}, editor = {Edelkamp, Stefan and M{\"o}ller, Ralf and Rueckert, Elmar}, keywords = {gm_dgm}, pages = {51–66}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, title = {Semi-unsupervised Learning: An In-depth Parameter Analysis}, year = 2021 }
Anomaly Detection in Beehives: An Algorithm Comparison. Davidson, Padraig; Steininger, Michael; Lautenschlager, Florian; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. 2021.
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@misc{davidson2021anomaly, author = {Davidson, Padraig and Steininger, Michael and Lautenschlager, Florian and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, keywords = {bees}, title = {Anomaly Detection in Beehives: An Algorithm Comparison}, year = 2021 }
A financial game with opportunities for fraud. Tritscher, Julian; Krause, Anna; Schl{ö}r, Daniel; Gwinner, Fabian; von Mammen, Sebastian; Hotho, Andreas. In IEE COG 2021, 2021. 2021.
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Even though companies store large amounts of business data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, obtaining data for financial fraud detection is prohibitively difficult due to privacy concerns and companies protecting trade secrets. One possible solution is game-based generation of synthetic ERP data, which poses the challenge of designing an environment that generates realistic ERP data and allows players to commit many different types of fraud. In this work, we design a multiplayer game that allows players to cooperatively run a fictional company, while simultaneously challenging them to maximize their personal gain. We introduce an approach for letting players explore fraud scenarios through emergent gameplay and present a prototype that may be primed with information from real world ERP systems to generate realistic data.

@article{tritscherfinancial, abstract = {Even though companies store large amounts of business data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, obtaining data for financial fraud detection is prohibitively difficult due to privacy concerns and companies protecting trade secrets. One possible solution is game-based generation of synthetic ERP data, which poses the challenge of designing an environment that generates realistic ERP data and allows players to commit many different types of fraud. In this work, we design a multiplayer game that allows players to cooperatively run a fictional company, while simultaneously challenging them to maximize their personal gain. We introduce an approach for letting players explore fraud scenarios through emergent gameplay and present a prototype that may be primed with information from real world ERP systems to generate realistic data.}, author = {Tritscher, Julian and Krause, Anna and Schl{\"o}r, Daniel and Gwinner, Fabian and von Mammen, Sebastian and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {IEE COG 2021}, keywords = {sys:relevantfor:dmir}, title = {A financial game with opportunities for fraud}, volume = 2021, year = 2021 }

2020[ to top ]

Evaluating the multi-task learning approach for land use regression modelling of air pollution. Dulny, Andrzej; Steininger, Michael; Lautenschlager, Florian; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In International Conference on Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. IASED, 2020.
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Air pollution has been linked to several health problems including heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. Modelling and analyzing this dependency requires reliable and accurate air pollutant measurements collected by stationary air monitoring stations. However, usually only a low number of such stations are present within a single city. To retrieve pollution concentrations for unmeasured locations, researchers rely on land use regression (LUR) models. Those models are typically developed for one pollutant only. However, as results in different areas have shown, modelling several related output variables through multi-task learning can improve the prediction results of the models significantly. In this work, we compared prediction results from single-task and multi-task learning multilayer perceptron models on measurements taken from the OpenSense dataset and the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory dataset. LUR features were generated from OpenStreetMap using OpenLUR and used to train hard parameter sharing multilayer perceptron models. The results show multi-task learning with sufficient data significantly improves the performance of a LUR model.

@inproceedings{dulny2020evaluating, abstract = {Air pollution has been linked to several health problems including heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. Modelling and analyzing this dependency requires reliable and accurate air pollutant measurements collected by stationary air monitoring stations. However, usually only a low number of such stations are present within a single city. To retrieve pollution concentrations for unmeasured locations, researchers rely on land use regression (LUR) models. Those models are typically developed for one pollutant only. However, as results in different areas have shown, modelling several related output variables through multi-task learning can improve the prediction results of the models significantly. In this work, we compared prediction results from single-task and multi-task learning multilayer perceptron models on measurements taken from the OpenSense dataset and the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory dataset. LUR features were generated from OpenStreetMap using OpenLUR and used to train hard parameter sharing multilayer perceptron models. The results show multi-task learning with sufficient data significantly improves the performance of a LUR model.}, author = {Dulny, Andrzej and Steininger, Michael and Lautenschlager, Florian and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {International Conference on Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning}, keywords = {climate}, organization = {IASED}, title = {Evaluating the multi-task learning approach for land use regression modelling of air pollution}, year = 2020 }
Anomaly Detection in Beehives using Deep Recurrent Autoencoders. Davidson, Padraig; Steininger, Michael; Lautenschlager, Florian; Kobs, Konstantin; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Sensor Networks (SENSORNETS 2020), pp. 142–149. SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda., 2020.
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@inproceedings{davidson2020anomaly, author = {Davidson, Padraig and Steininger, Michael and Lautenschlager, Florian and Kobs, Konstantin and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Sensor Networks (SENSORNETS 2020)}, keywords = {beehive}, number = 9, pages = {142-149}, publisher = {SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.}, title = {Anomaly Detection in Beehives using Deep Recurrent Autoencoders}, year = 2020 }
Financial Fraud Detection with Improved Neural Arithmetic Logic Units. Schlör, Daniel; Ring, Markus; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. Vol. Fifth Workshop on MIning DAta for financial applicationS. 2020.
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@inproceedings{schlr2020financial, author = {Schlör, Daniel and Ring, Markus and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, keywords = {inalu}, number = 5, title = {Financial Fraud Detection with Improved Neural Arithmetic Logic Units}, volume = {Fifth Workshop on MIning DAta for financial applicationS}, year = 2020 }
Deep Learning for Climate Model Output Statistics. Steininger, Michael; Abel, Daniel; Ziegler, Katrin; Krause, Anna; Paeth, Heiko; Hotho, Andreas. In NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning. 2020.
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@article{steininger2020deep, author = {Steininger, Michael and Abel, Daniel and Ziegler, Katrin and Krause, Anna and Paeth, Heiko and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning}, keywords = {research:physics}, title = {Deep Learning for Climate Model Output Statistics}, year = 2020 }
OpenLUR: Off-the-shelf air pollution modeling with open features and machine learning. Lautenschlager, Florian; Becker, Martin; Kobs, Konstantin; Steininger, Michael; Davidson, Padraig; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Atmospheric Environment, 233, p. 117535. 2020.
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To assess the exposure of citizens to pollutants like NOx or particulate matter in urban areas, land use regression (LUR) models are a well established method. LUR models leverage information about environmental and anthropogenic factors such as cars, heating, or industry to predict air pollution in areas where no measurements have been made. However, existing approaches are often not globally applicable and require tedious hyper-parameter tuning to enable high quality predictions. In this work, we tackle these issues by introducing OpenLUR, an off-the-shelf approach for modeling air pollution that (i) works on a set of novel features solely extracted from the globally and openly available data source OpenStreetMap and (ii) is based on state-of-the-art machine learning featuring automated hyper-parameter tuning in order to minimize manual effort. We show that our proposed features are able to outperform their counterparts from local and closed sources, and illustrate how automated hyper parameter tuning can yield competitve results while alleviating the need for expert knowledge in machine learning and manual effort. Importantly, we further demonstrate the potential of the global availability of our features by applying cross-learning across different cities in order to reduce the need for a large amount of training samples. Overall, OpenLUR represents an off-the-shelf approach that facilitates easily reproducible experiments and the development of globally applicable models.

@article{lautenschlager2020openlur, abstract = {To assess the exposure of citizens to pollutants like NOx or particulate matter in urban areas, land use regression (LUR) models are a well established method. LUR models leverage information about environmental and anthropogenic factors such as cars, heating, or industry to predict air pollution in areas where no measurements have been made. However, existing approaches are often not globally applicable and require tedious hyper-parameter tuning to enable high quality predictions. In this work, we tackle these issues by introducing OpenLUR, an off-the-shelf approach for modeling air pollution that (i) works on a set of novel features solely extracted from the globally and openly available data source OpenStreetMap and (ii) is based on state-of-the-art machine learning featuring automated hyper-parameter tuning in order to minimize manual effort. We show that our proposed features are able to outperform their counterparts from local and closed sources, and illustrate how automated hyper parameter tuning can yield competitve results while alleviating the need for expert knowledge in machine learning and manual effort. Importantly, we further demonstrate the potential of the global availability of our features by applying cross-learning across different cities in order to reduce the need for a large amount of training samples. Overall, OpenLUR represents an off-the-shelf approach that facilitates easily reproducible experiments and the development of globally applicable models.}, author = {Lautenschlager, Florian and Becker, Martin and Kobs, Konstantin and Steininger, Michael and Davidson, Padraig and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {Atmospheric Environment}, keywords = {p2map}, month = {07}, pages = 117535, title = {OpenLUR: Off-the-shelf air pollution modeling with open features and machine learning}, volume = 233, year = 2020 }

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