Hydrozip: how hydrological knowledge can be used to improve compression of hydrological data

DOI10.3390/E15041289MaRDI QIDQ742695zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Steven V. Weijs, Nick van de Giesen, Marc B. Parlange

Publication date 19 September 2014

Published in Entropy (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.3390/e15041289

zbMATH Keywords

algorithmic information theorydata compressionhydrologyinferenceMOPEXstreamflow

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Statistical aspects of information-theoretic topics (62B10) Computational methods for problems pertaining to geophysics (86-08) Geostatistics (86A32) Information theory (general) (94A15) Channel models (including quantum) in information and communication theory (94A40)

Review text

Summary: From algorithmic information theory, which connects the information content of a data set to the shortest computer program that can produce it, it is known that there are strong analogies between compression, knowledge, inference and prediction. The more we know about a data generating process, the better we can predict and compress the data. A model that is inferred from data should ideally be a compact description of those data. In theory, this means that hydrological knowledge could be incorporated into compression algorithms to more efficiently compress hydrological data and to outperform general purpose compression algorithms. In this study, we develop such a hydrological data compressor, named HydroZIP, and test in practice whether it can outperform general purpose compression algorithms on hydrological data from 431 river basins from the Model Parameter Estimation Experiment (MOPEX) data set. HydroZIP compresses using temporal dependencies and parametric distributions. Resulting file sizes are interpreted as measures of information content, complexity and model adequacy. These results are discussed to illustrate points related to learning from data, overfitting and model complexity.

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• Quantitative information fusion for hydrological sciences.
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Cites work

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Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• HydroZIP

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