Forecasting the Behavior of Multivariate Time Series using Neural Networks

This paper presents a neural network approach to multivariate time-series analysis. Real world observations of flour prices in three cities have been used as a benchmark in our experiments. Feedforward connectionist networks have been designed to model flour prices over the period from August 1972 to November 1980 for the cities of Buffalo, Minneapolis, and Kansas City. Remarkable success has been achieved in training the networks to learn the price curve for each of these cities, and thereby to make accurate price predictions. Our results show that the neural network approach leads to better predictions than the autoregressive moving average(ARMA) model of Tiao and Tsay [TiTs 89]. Our method is not problem-specific, and can be applied to other problems in the fields of dynamical system modeling, recognition, prediction and control

Energy rating of a water pumping station using multivariate analysis

Among water management policies, the preservation and the saving of energy demand in water supply and treatment systems play key roles. When focusing on energy, the customary metric to determine the performance of water supply systems is linked to the definition of component-based energy indicators. This approach is unfit to account for interactions occurring among system elements or between the system and its environment. On the other hand, the development of information technology has led to the availability of increasing large amount of data, typically gathered from distributed sensor networks in so-called smart grids. In this context, data intensive methodologies address the possibility of using complex network modeling approaches, and advocate the issues related to the interpretation and analysis of large amount of data produced by smart sensor networks. In this perspective, the present work aims to use data intensive techniques in the energy analysis of a water management network. The purpose is to provide new metrics for the energy rating of the system and to be able to provide insights into the dynamics of its operations. The study applies neural network as a tool to predict energy demand, when using flowrate and vibration data as predictor variables