FireMPC: A Multi-Source Pan-Canadian Wildfire Benchmark Revealing Spatiotemporal Generalization Gaps
Zhengsen Xu ⋅ Sibo Cheng ⋅ Lanying Wang ⋅ Aryan Sharma ⋅ Linlin Xu
Abstract
Under Climate Change, wildfire activity is intensifying worldwide, with Canada experiencing increasingly severe events that now affect every province and territory. However, existing machine-learning (ML) datasets remain constrained by geographic bias, narrow driver sets, opaque sample selection, and limited exploration of model failure modes. We introduce \textbf{FireMPC} dataset, the first pan-Canadian multisource wildfire risk benchmark, covering approximately one billion hectares, or $9{,}840 \times 4{,}639$ km$^2$, across the entire Canada at $1$ km daily resolution from $2000$ to $2025$, and integrating $55$ drivers across fuel, topography, meteorology, and human activity. FireMPC is also the first large-scale machine-learning benchmark to embed the six knowledge-driven indicators of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS), bridging knowledge-based and data-driven modeling. Building on this dataset, we propose \textbf{FWI-guided hard negative mining (FWI-HNM)} strategy. We score each non-fire candidate using a calibrated CFFDRS composite, and then incorporate these hard negatives during model training. FWI-HNM mitigates the trivial-negative failure mode of random sampling, yielding F1/PR-AUC gains of $1\%$-$2\%$ and ECE reductions of up to $82\%$ across thirteen benchmark ML models. Stress tests under horizon-extension and spatial-generalization protocols expose substantial generalization gaps. Mean F1 falls from $70.2\%$ at the next-day horizon ($\Delta t = 1$) to $54.2\%$ at the 30-day horizon ($\Delta t = 30$). All six ecological, land-cover, and regional spatial-shift scenarios yield a $25\%$-$29\%$ relative F1 drop. These results motivate the development of large-scale, driver-diverse, spatially comprehensive datasets. The dataset, code, and sampling artifacts are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FireMPC}.
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