Forecasting Time Series with VARMA Recursions on Graphs

Graph-based techniques emerged as a choice to deal with the dimensionality issues in modeling multivariate time series. However, there is yet no complete understanding of how the underlying structure could be exploited to ease this task. This work provides contributions in this direction by considering the forecasting of a process evolving over a graph. We make use of the (approximate) time-vertex stationarity assumption, i.e., timevarying graph signals whose first and second order statistical moments are invariant over time and correlated to a known graph topology. The latter is combined with VAR and VARMA models to tackle the dimensionality issues present in predicting the temporal evolution of multivariate time series. We find out that by projecting the data to the graph spectral domain: (i) the multivariate model estimation reduces to that of fitting a number of uncorrelated univariate ARMA models and (ii) an optimal low-rank data representation can be exploited so as to further reduce the estimation costs. In the case that the multivariate process can be observed at a subset of nodes, the proposed models extend naturally to Kalman filtering on graphs allowing for optimal tracking. Numerical experiments with both synthetic and real data validate the proposed approach and highlight its benefits over state-of-the-art alternatives.Comment: submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Heteroscedastic Gaussian processes for uncertainty modeling in large-scale crowdsourced traffic data

Accurately modeling traffic speeds is a fundamental part of efficient intelligent transportation systems. Nowadays, with the widespread deployment of GPS-enabled devices, it has become possible to crowdsource the collection of speed information to road users (e.g. through mobile applications or dedicated in-vehicle devices). Despite its rather wide spatial coverage, crowdsourced speed data also brings very important challenges, such as the highly variable measurement noise in the data due to a variety of driving behaviors and sample sizes. When not properly accounted for, this noise can severely compromise any application that relies on accurate traffic data. In this article, we propose the use of heteroscedastic Gaussian processes (HGP) to model the time-varying uncertainty in large-scale crowdsourced traffic data. Furthermore, we develop a HGP conditioned on sample size and traffic regime (SRC-HGP), which makes use of sample size information (probe vehicles per minute) as well as previous observed speeds, in order to more accurately model the uncertainty in observed speeds. Using 6 months of crowdsourced traffic data from Copenhagen, we empirically show that the proposed heteroscedastic models produce significantly better predictive distributions when compared to current state-of-the-art methods for both speed imputation and short-term forecasting tasks.Comment: 22 pages, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies (Elsevier

Calibrating the sqHIMMELI v1.0 wetland methane emission model with hierarchical modeling and adaptive MCMC

Estimating methane (CH4) emissions from natural wetlands is complex, and the estimates contain large uncertainties. The models used for the task are typically heavily parameterized and the parameter values are not well known. In this study, we perform a Bayesian model calibration for a new wetland CH4 emission model to improve the quality of the predictions and to understand the limitations of such models. The detailed process model that we analyze contains descriptions for CH4 production from anaerobic respiration, CH4 oxidation, and gas transportation by diffusion, ebullition, and the aerenchyma cells of vascular plants. The processes are controlled by several tunable parameters. We use a hierarchical statistical model to describe the parameters and obtain the posterior distributions of the parameters and uncertainties in the processes with adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), importance resampling, and time series analysis techniques. For the estimation, the analysis utilizes measurement data from the Siikaneva flux measurement site in southern Finland. The uncertainties related to the parameters and the modeled processes are described quantitatively. At the process level, the flux measurement data are able to constrain the CH4 production processes, methane oxidation, and the different gas transport processes. The posterior covariance structures explain how the parameters and the processes are related. Additionally, the flux and flux component uncertain-ties are analyzed both at the annual and daily levels. The parameter posterior densities obtained provide information regarding importance of the different processes, which is also useful for development of wetland methane emission models other than the square root HelsinkI Model of MEthane buiLd- up and emIssion for peatlands (sqHIMMELI). The hierarchical modeling allows us to assess the effects of some of the parameters on an annual basis. The results of the calibration and the cross validation suggest that the early spring net primary production could be used to predict parameters affecting the annual methane production. Even though the calibration is specific to the Siikaneva site, the hierarchical modeling approach is well suited for larger-scale studies and the results of the estimation pave way for a regional or global- scale Bayesian calibration of wetland emission models.Peer reviewe