No Arabic abstract
Forecasting high-dimensional time series plays a crucial role in many applications such as demand forecasting and financial predictions. Modern datasets can have millions of correlated time-series that evolve together, i.e they are extremely high dimensional (one dimension for each individual time-series). There is a need for exploiting global patterns and coupling them with local calibration for better prediction. However, most recent deep learning approaches in the literature are one-dimensional, i.e, even though they are trained on the whole dataset, during prediction, the future forecast for a single dimension mainly depends on past values from the same dimension. In this paper, we seek to correct this deficiency and propose DeepGLO, a deep forecasting model which thinks globally and acts locally. In particular, DeepGLO is a hybrid model that combines a global matrix factorization model regularized by a temporal convolution network, along with another temporal network that can capture local properties of each time-series and associated covariates. Our model can be trained effectively on high-dimensional but diverse time series, where different time series can have vastly different scales, without a priori normalization or rescaling. Empirical results demonstrate that DeepGLO can outperform state-of-the-art approaches; for example, we see more than 25% improvement in WAPE over other methods on a public dataset that contains more than 100K-dimensional time series.
Many applications require the ability to judge uncertainty of time-series forecasts. Uncertainty is often specified as point-wise error bars around a mean or median forecast. Due to temporal dependencies, such a method obscures some information. We would ideally have a way to query the posterior probability of the entire time-series given the predictive variables, or at a minimum, be able to draw samples from this distribution. We use a Bayesian dictionary learning algorithm to statistically generate an ensemble of forecasts. We show that the algorithm performs as well as a physics-based ensemble method for temperature forecasts for Houston. We conclude that the method shows promise for scenario forecasting where physics-based methods are absent.
We study the $r$-complex contagion influence maximization problem. In the influence maximization problem, one chooses a fixed number of initial seeds in a social network to maximize the spread of their influence. In the $r$-complex contagion model, each uninfected vertex in the network becomes infected if it has at least $r$ infected neighbors. In this paper, we focus on a random graph model named the stochastic hierarchical blockmodel, which is a special case of the well-studied stochastic blockmodel. When the graph is not exceptionally sparse, in particular, when each edge appears with probability $omega(n^{-(1+1/r)})$, under certain mild assumptions, we prove that the optimal seeding strategy is to put all the seeds in a single community. This matches the intuition that in a nonsubmodular cascade model placing seeds near each other creates synergy. However, it sharply contrasts with the intuition for submodular cascade models (e.g., the independent cascade model and the linear threshold model) in which nearby seeds tend to erode each others effects. Our key technique is a novel time-asynchronized coupling of four cascade processes. Finally, we show that this observation yields a polynomial time dynamic programming algorithm which outputs optimal seeds if each edge appears with a probability either in $omega(n^{-(1+1/r)})$ or in $o(n^{-2})$.
In this paper we study the generalization capabilities of fully-connected neural networks trained in the context of time series forecasting. Time series do not satisfy the typical assumption in statistical learning theory of the data being i.i.d. samples from some data-generating distribution. We use the input and weight Hessians, that is the smoothness of the learned function with respect to the input and the width of the minimum in weight space, to quantify a networks ability to generalize to unseen data. While such generalization metrics have been studied extensively in the i.i.d. setting of for example image recognition, here we empirically validate their use in the task of time series forecasting. Furthermore we discuss how one can control the generalization capability of the network by means of the training process using the learning rate, batch size and the number of training iterations as controls. Using these hyperparameters one can efficiently control the complexity of the output function without imposing explicit constraints.
This paper addresses the problem of time series forecasting for non-stationary signals and multiple future steps prediction. To handle this challenging task, we introduce DILATE (DIstortion Loss including shApe and TimE), a new objective function for training deep neural networks. DILATE aims at accurately predicting sudden changes, and explicitly incorporates two terms supporting precise shape and temporal change detection. We introduce a differentiable loss function suitable for training deep neural nets, and provide a custom back-prop implementation for speeding up optimization. We also introduce a variant of DILATE, which provides a smooth generalization of temporally-constrained Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). Experiments carried out on various non-stationary datasets reveal the very good behaviour of DILATE compared to models trained with the standard Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss function, and also to DTW and variants. DILATE is also agnostic to the choice of the model, and we highlight its benefit for training fully connected networks as well as specialized recurrent architectures, showing its capacity to improve over state-of-the-art trajectory forecasting approaches.
We present a method for conditional time series forecasting based on an adaptation of the recent deep convolutional WaveNet architecture. The proposed network contains stacks of dilated convolutions that allow it to access a broad range of history when forecasting, a ReLU activation function and conditioning is performed by applying multiple convolutional filters in parallel to separate time series which allows for the fast processing of data and the exploitation of the correlation structure between the multivariate time series. We test and analyze the performance of the convolutional network both unconditionally as well as conditionally for financial time series forecasting using the S&P500, the volatility index, the CBOE interest rate and several exchange rates and extensively compare it to the performance of the well-known autoregressive model and a long-short term memory network. We show that a convolutional network is well-suited for regression-type problems and is able to effectively learn dependencies in and between the series without the need for long historical time series, is a time-efficient and easy to implement alternative to recurrent-type networks and tends to outperform linear and recurrent models.