Taylor-Sensus Network: Embracing Noise to Enlighten Uncertainty for Scientific Data

Abstract

Uncertainty estimation is crucial in scientific data for machine learning. Current uncertainty estimation methods mainly focus on the model's inherent uncertainty, while neglecting the explicit modeling of noise in the data. Furthermore, noise estimation methods typically rely on temporal or spatial dependencies, which can pose a significant challenge in structured scientific data where such dependencies among samples are often absent. To address these challenges in scientific research, we propose the Taylor-Sensus Network (TSNet). TSNet innovatively uses a Taylor series expansion to model complex, heteroscedastic noise and proposes a deep Taylor block for aware noise distribution. TSNet includes a noise-aware contrastive learning module and a data density perception module for aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Additionally, an uncertainty combination operator is used to integrate these uncertainties, and the network is trained using a novel heteroscedastic mean square error loss. TSNet demonstrates superior performance over mainstream and state-of-the-art methods in experiments, highlighting its potential in scientific research and noise resistance. It will be open-source to facilitate the community of "AI for Science".