Analysis and Prediction of the Typhoon from an Informatics Perspective

Analysis and prediction of the typhoon has been intensively studied by a number of meteorologists because of the huge impact of the typhoon to the society. We study the same issue from a different viewpoint — from an informatics perspective. Our goal is to discover relevant knowledge for typhoon analysis and prediction by means of various computational tools that have been developed in the informatics community. Our research takes advantage of the large collection of typhoon data, especially the satellite images of the typhoon, with the application of multimedia data mining methods in the hope of discovering hidden regularities and anomalies in the data collection using data mining algorithms such as principal component analysis, K-means clustering, and self-organizing map. In this paper, we summarize our approaches, achievements and open problems, with the brief introduction of our hand-crafted system, IMET (Image Mining Environment for Typhoon analysis and prediction).