Knowledge-Informed Mapping (KIM) Toolkit

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Installation
• Documentation
• Examples
• License
• Acknowledgments
• How to Cite
• Help and Feedback
• Contacts

Overview

KIM is a Knowledge-Informed Mapping toolkit in Python to optimize the development of the mapping $ƒ$ from a vector of inputs $\mathbf{X}$ to a vector of outputs $\mathbf{Y}$. KIM mainly builds on the methodology development of deep learning-based inverse mapping in Jiang et al. 2023 and Wang et al. 2025. It involves two key procedures: (1) an exploratory data analysis using information theory to identify the dependency between $\mathbf{X}$ and $\mathbf{Y}$ and filter out both insignificant and redundant inputs through global sensitivity analysis and conditional independence testing; and (2) ensemble learning of $ƒ$ using neural networks to account for its structural uncertainty. KIM is mostly rewritten in JAX and also supports basic parallel computing on CPU cores for statistical significance test and ensemble learning by using Joblib.

Installation

1. Install Miniconda if you don't have it already.

2. Open a terminal and create a new virtual environment named kim with Python 3.11:

   conda create --name kim python=3.11

3. Activate the newly created virtual environment:

   conda activate kim

4. Install the package using pip within the activated virtual environment:

   pip install kim-jax

5. (Optional) Download the git repo to get the example jupyter notebooks:

   git clone https://github.com/PeishiJiang/KIM.git

6. (Optional, needed to run the example notebooks) Register the kim virtual environment as a Jupyter kernel, since the example notebooks pin "kernelspec": {"name": "kim"}:

   python -m ipykernel install --user --name kim

Documentation

The official documentation is hosted on the package website. Please refer to Math behind KIM for a complete description of the theory behind the package.

Examples

We provide one tutorial case and two real cases of applying KIM to performing inverse modeling by using Jupyter notebook to illustrate the package usage.

Case 0: Emulating a multivariate nonlinear system. We develop forward mappings to emulate three predictand driven by four predictors via a nonlinear system.

Case 1: Calibrating a cloud chamber model. We develop inverse mappings to estimate two key parameters, i.e., wall fluxes ($\lambda_w$) and collision processes ($\lambda_c$) of a cloud chamber model from synthetic observations.

Case 2: Calibrating an integrated hydrological model. We develop inverse mappings to estimate eight parameters of the Advanced Terrestrial Simulator (ATS) from the streamflow observations at the outlet of Coal Creek watershed, CO, USA.

Expected runtime. The tutorial runs in a few minutes on a laptop. Each real case takes roughly 10-15 minutes on a 16-core laptop (about 3-5 minutes for the sensitivity analysis and shuffle tests, and 6-7 minutes to train the 100-member ensembles); the notebooks cap n_jobs at the available CPU cores, so fewer cores mean proportionally longer runs. Both kim*.ipynb notebooks save the sensitivity analysis to results*/data/, and a second run can skip the analysis by loading it with Data.load() instead of calling Data.calculate_sensitivity().

License

Distributed under the Simplified BSD License. See LICENSE for more information.

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the IDEAS-Watersheds project.

How to Cite

Jiang et al., (2026). KIM: Knowledge-Informed Mapping Toolkit. Journal of Open Source Software, 11(126), 11112, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.11112.

Help and Feedback

• GitHub Issues for bug reports. Search before opening a new one.
• GitHub Discussions for questions, design ideas, and general conversation about the package.

Contacts

Peishi Jiang (shixijps@gmail.com)

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