ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

Forecasting time series of inhomogeneous Poisson processes with application to call center workforce management

174   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Haipeng Shen
 تاريخ النشر 2008
  مجال البحث الاحصاء الرياضي
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

We consider forecasting the latent rate profiles of a time series of inhomogeneous Poisson processes. The work is motivated by operations management of queueing systems, in particular, telephone call centers, where accurate forecasting of call arrival rates is a crucial primitive for efficient staffing of such centers. Our forecasting approach utilizes dimension reduction through a factor analysis of Poisson variables, followed by time series modeling of factor score series. Time series forecasts of factor scores are combined with factor loadings to yield forecasts of future Poisson rate profiles. Penalized Poisson regressions on factor loadings guided by time series forecasts of factor scores are used to generate dynamic within-process rate updating. Methods are also developed to obtain distributional forecasts. Our methods are illustrated using simulation and real data. The empirical results demonstrate how forecasting and dynamic updating of call arrival rates can affect the accuracy of call center staffing.



قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

158 - Hyunji Moon , Jinwoo Choi 2020
Predicting equipment failure is important because it could improve availability and cut down the operating budget. Previous literature has attempted to model failure rate with bathtub-formed function, Weibull distribution, Bayesian network, or AHP. B ut these models perform well with a sufficient amount of data and could not incorporate the two salient characteristics; imbalanced category and sharing structure. Hierarchical model has the advantage of partial pooling. The proposed model is based on Bayesian hierarchical B-spline. Time series of the failure rate of 99 Republic of Korea Naval ships are modeled hierarchically, where each layer corresponds to ship engine, engine type, and engine archetype. As a result of the analysis, the suggested model predicted the failure rate of an entire lifetime accurately in multiple situational conditions, such as prior knowledge of the engine.
In this study we show that standard well-known file compression programs (zlib, bzip2, etc.) are able to forecast real-world time series data well. The strength of our approach is its ability to use a set of data compression algorithms and automatica lly choose the best one of them during the process of forecasting. Besides, modern data-compressors are able to find many kinds of latent regularities using some methods of artificial intelligence (for example, some data-compressors are based on finding the smallest formal grammar that describes the time series). Thus, our approach makes it possible to apply some particular methods of artificial intelligence for time-series forecasting. As examples of the application of the proposed method, we made forecasts for the monthly T-index and the Kp-index time series using standard compressors. In both cases, we used the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as an accuracy measure. For the monthly T-index time series, we made 18 forecasts beyond the available data for each month since January 2011 to July 2017. We show that, in comparison with the forecasts made by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, our method more accurately predicts one value ahead. The Kp-index time series consists of 3-hour values ranging from 0 to 9. For each day from February 4, 2018 to March 28, 2018, we made forecasts for 24 values ahead. We compared our forecasts with the forecasts made by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). The results showed that the accuracy of our method is similar to the accuracy of the SWPCs method. As in the previous case, we also obtained more accurate one-step forecasts.
We propose a Bayesian nonparametric approach to modelling and predicting a class of functional time series with application to energy markets, based on fully observed, noise-free functional data. Traders in such contexts conceive profitable strategie s if they can anticipate the impact of their bidding actions on the aggregate demand and supply curves, which in turn need to be predicted reliably. Here we propose a simple Bayesian nonparametric method for predicting such curves, which take the form of monotonic bounded step functions. We borrow ideas from population genetics by defining a class of interacting particle systems to model the functional trajectory, and develop an implementation strategy which uses ideas from Markov chain Monte Carlo and approximate Bayesian computation techniques and allows to circumvent the intractability of the likelihood. Our approach shows great adaptation to the degree of smoothness of the curves and the volatility of the functional series, proves to be robust to an increase of the forecast horizon and yields an uncertainty quantification for the functional forecasts. We illustrate the model and discuss its performance with simulated datasets and on real data relative to the Italian natural gas market.
The need to forecast COVID-19 related variables continues to be pressing as the epidemic unfolds. Different efforts have been made, with compartmental models in epidemiology and statistical models such as AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARI MA), Exponential Smoothing (ETS) or computing intelligence models. These efforts have proved useful in some instances by allowing decision makers to distinguish different scenarios during the emergency, but their accuracy has been disappointing, forecasts ignore uncertainties and less attention is given to local areas. In this study, we propose a simple Multiple Linear Regression model, optimised to use call data to forecast the number of daily confirmed cases. Moreover, we produce a probabilistic forecast that allows decision makers to better deal with risk. Our proposed approach outperforms ARIMA, ETS and a regression model without call data, evaluated by three point forecast error metrics, one prediction interval and two probabilistic forecast accuracy measures. The simplicity, interpretability and reliability of the model, obtained in a careful forecasting exercise, is a meaningful contribution to decision makers at local level who acutely need to organise resources in already strained health services. We hope that this model would serve as a building block of other forecasting efforts that on the one hand would help front-line personal and decision makers at local level, and on the other would facilitate the communication with other modelling efforts being made at the national level to improve the way we tackle this pandemic and other similar future challenges.
Time series forecasting is essential for agents to make decisions in many domains. Existing models rely on classical statistical methods to predict future values based on previously observed numerical information. Yet, practitioners often rely on vis ualizations such as charts and plots to reason about their predictions. Inspired by the end-users, we re-imagine the topic by creating a framework to produce visual forecasts, similar to the way humans intuitively do. In this work, we take a novel approach by leveraging advances in deep learning to extend the field of time series forecasting to a visual setting. We do this by transforming the numerical analysis problem into the computer vision domain. Using visualizations of time series data as input, we train a convolutional autoencoder to produce corresponding visual forecasts. We examine various synthetic and real datasets with diverse degrees of complexity. Our experiments show that visual forecasting is effective for cyclic data but somewhat less for irregular data such as stock price. Importantly, we find the proposed visual forecasting method to outperform numerical baselines. We attribute the success of the visual forecasting approach to the fact that we convert the continuous numerical regression problem into a discrete domain with quantization of the continuous target signal into pixel space.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا