No Arabic abstract
Time series forecasting is an active research topic in academia as well as industry. Although we see an increasing amount of adoptions of machine learning methods in solving some of those forecasting challenges, statistical methods remain powerful while dealing with low granularity data. This paper introduces a refined Bayesian exponential smoothing model with the help of probabilistic programming languages including Stan. Our model refinements include additional global trend, transformation for multiplicative form, noise distribution and choice of priors. A benchmark study is conducted on a rich set of time-series data sets for our models along with other well-known time series models.
Sampling from a complex distribution $pi$ and approximating its intractable normalizing constant Z are challenging problems. In this paper, a novel family of importance samplers (IS) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers is derived. Given an invertible map T, these schemes combine (with weights) elements from the forward and backward Orbits through points sampled from a proposal distribution $rho$. The map T does not leave the target $pi$ invariant, hence the name NEO, standing for Non-Equilibrium Orbits. NEO-IS provides unbiased estimators of the normalizing constant and self-normalized IS estimators of expectations under $pi$ while NEO-MCMC combines multiple NEO-IS estimates of the normalizing constant and an iterated sampling-importance resampling mechanism to sample from $pi$. For T chosen as a discrete-time integrator of a conformal Hamiltonian system, NEO-IS achieves state-of-the art performance on difficult benchmarks and NEO-MCMC is able to explore highly multimodal targets. Additionally, we provide detailed theoretical results for both methods. In particular, we show that NEO-MCMC is uniformly geometrically ergodic and establish explicit mixing time estimates under mild conditions.
Probabilistic forecasts in the form of probability distributions over future events have become popular in several fields including meteorology, hydrology, economics, and demography. In typical applications, many alternative statistical models and data sources can be used to produce probabilistic forecasts. Hence, evaluating and selecting among competing methods is an important task. The scoringRules package for R provides functionality for comparative evaluation of probabilistic models based on proper scoring rules, covering a wide range of situations in applied work. This paper discusses implementation and usage details, presents case studies from meteorology and economics, and points to the relevant background literature.
MCMC algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings algorithms are slowed down by the computation of complex target distributions as exemplified by huge datasets. We offer in this paper an approach to reduce the computational costs of such algorithms by a simple and universal divide-and-conquer strategy. The idea behind the generic acceleration is to divide the acceptance step into several parts, aiming at a major reduction in computing time that outranks the corresponding reduction in acceptance probability. The division decomposes the prior x likelihood term into a product such that some of its components are much cheaper to compute than others. Each of the components can be sequentially compared with a uniform variate, the first rejection signalling that the proposed value is considered no further, This approach can in turn be accelerated as part of a prefetching algorithm taking advantage of the parallel abilities of the computer at hand. We illustrate those accelerating features on a series of toy and realistic examples.
Prediction rule ensembles (PREs) are sparse collections of rules, offering highly interpretable regression and classification models. This paper presents the R package pre, which derives PREs through the methodology of Friedman and Popescu (2008). The implementation and functionality of package pre is described and illustrated through application on a dataset on the prediction of depression. Furthermore, accuracy and sparsity of PREs is compared with that of single trees, random forest and lasso regression in four benchmark datasets. Results indicate that pre derives ensembles with predictive accuracy comparable to that of random forests, while using a smaller number of variables for prediction.
Although models for count data with over-dispersion have been widely considered in the literature, models for under-dispersion -- the opposite phenomenon -- have received less attention as it is only relatively common in particular research fields such as biodosimetry and ecology. The Good distribution is a flexible alternative for modelling count data showing either over-dispersion or under-dispersion, although no R packages are still available to the best of our knowledge. We aim to present in the following the R package good that computes the standard probabilistic functions (i.e., probability density function, cumulative distribution function, and quantile function) and generates random samples from a population following a Good distribution. The package also considers a function for Good regression, including covariates in a similar way to that of the standard glm function. We finally show the use of such a package with some real-world data examples addressing both over-dispersion and especially under-dispersion.