Combining Multiple Time Series Models Through A Robust Weighted Mechanism

Improvement of time series forecasting accuracy through combining multiple models is an important as well as a dynamic area of research. As a result, various forecasts combination methods have been developed in literature. However, most of them are based on simple linear ensemble strategies and hence ignore the possible relationships between two or more participating models. In this paper, we propose a robust weighted nonlinear ensemble technique which considers the individual forecasts from different models as well as the correlations among them while combining. The proposed ensemble is constructed using three well-known forecasting models and is tested for three real-world time series. A comparison is made among the proposed scheme and three other widely used linear combination methods, in terms of the obtained forecast errors. This comparison shows that our ensemble scheme provides significantly lower forecast errors than each individual model as well as each of the four linear combination methods.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, conferenc

Forecasting Model for Crude Oil Price Using Artificial Neural Networks and Commodity Futures Prices

This paper presents a model based on multilayer feedforward neural network to forecast crude oil spot price direction in the short-term, up to three days ahead. A great deal of attention was paid on finding the optimal ANN model structure. In addition, several methods of data pre-processing were tested. Our approach is to create a benchmark based on lagged value of pre-processed spot price, then add pre-processed futures prices for 1, 2, 3,and four months to maturity, one by one and also altogether. The results on the benchmark suggest that a dynamic model of 13 lags is the optimal to forecast spot price direction for the short-term. Further, the forecast accuracy of the direction of the market was 78%, 66%, and 53% for one, two, and three days in future conclusively. For all the experiments, that include futures data as an input, the results show that on the short-term, futures prices do hold new information on the spot price direction. The results obtained will generate comprehensive understanding of the crude oil dynamic which help investors and individuals for risk managements.Comment: 8 Pages, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS

Wind Power Forecasting Methods Based on Deep Learning: A Survey

Accurate wind power forecasting in wind farm can effectively reduce the enormous impact on grid operation safety when high permeability intermittent power supply is connected to the power grid. Aiming to provide reference strategies for relevant researchers as well as practical applications, this paper attempts to provide the literature investigation and methods analysis of deep learning, enforcement learning and transfer learning in wind speed and wind power forecasting modeling. Usually, wind speed and wind power forecasting around a wind farm requires the calculation of the next moment of the definite state, which is usually achieved based on the state of the atmosphere that encompasses nearby atmospheric pressure, temperature, roughness, and obstacles. As an effective method of high-dimensional feature extraction, deep neural network can theoretically deal with arbitrary nonlinear transformation through proper structural design, such as adding noise to outputs, evolutionary learning used to optimize hidden layer weights, optimize the objective function so as to save information that can improve the output accuracy while filter out the irrelevant or less affected information for forecasting. The establishment of high-precision wind speed and wind power forecasting models is always a challenge due to the randomness, instantaneity and seasonal characteristics

An Introductory Study on Time Series Modeling and Forecasting

Time series modeling and forecasting has fundamental importance to various practical domains. Thus a lot of active research works is going on in this subject during several years. Many important models have been proposed in literature for improving the accuracy and effectiveness of time series forecasting. The aim of this dissertation work is to present a concise description of some popular time series forecasting models used in practice, with their salient features. In this thesis, we have described three important classes of time series models, viz. the stochastic, neural networks and SVM based models, together with their inherent forecasting strengths and weaknesses. We have also discussed about the basic issues related to time series modeling, such as stationarity, parsimony, overfitting, etc. Our discussion about different time series models is supported by giving the experimental forecast results, performed on six real time series datasets. While fitting a model to a dataset, special care is taken to select the most parsimonious one. To evaluate forecast accuracy as well as to compare among different models fitted to a time series, we have used the five performance measures, viz. MSE, MAD, RMSE, MAPE and Theil's U-statistics. For each of the six datasets, we have shown the obtained forecast diagram which graphically depicts the closeness between the original and forecasted observations. To have authenticity as well as clarity in our discussion about time series modeling and forecasting, we have taken the help of various published research works from reputed journals and some standard books.Comment: 67 pages, 29 figures, 33 references, boo

Multivariate Ensemble Forecast Framework for Demand Prediction of Anomalous Days

An accurate load forecast is always important for the power industry and energy players as it enables stakeholders to make critical decisions. In addition, its importance is further increased with growing uncertainties in the generation sector due to the high penetration of renewable energy and the introduction of demand side management strategies. An incremental improvement in grid-level demand forecast of anomalous days can potentially save millions of dollars. However, due to an increasing penetration of renewable energy resources and their dependency on several meteorological and exogenous variables, accurate load forecasting of anomalous days has now become very challenging. To improve the prediction accuracy of the load forecasting, an ensemble forecast framework (ENFF) is proposed with a systematic combination of three multiple predictors, namely Elman neural network (ELM), feedforward neural network (FNN) and radial basis function (RBF) neural network. These predictors are trained using global particle swarm optimization (GPSO) to improve their prediction capability in the ENFF. The outputs of individual predictors are combined using a trim aggregation technique by removing forecasting anomalies. Real recorded data of New England ISO grid is used for training and testing of the ENFF for anomalous days. The forecast results of the proposed ENFF indicate a significant improvement in prediction accuracy in comparison to autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and back-propagation neural networks (BPNN) based benchmark models

PSO based Neural Networks vs. Traditional Statistical Models for Seasonal Time Series Forecasting

Seasonality is a distinctive characteristic which is often observed in many practical time series. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are a class of promising models for efficiently recognizing and forecasting seasonal patterns. In this paper, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach is used to enhance the forecasting strengths of feedforward ANN (FANN) as well as Elman ANN (EANN) models for seasonal data. Three widely popular versions of the basic PSO algorithm, viz. Trelea-I, Trelea-II and Clerc-Type1 are considered here. The empirical analysis is conducted on three real-world seasonal time series. Results clearly show that each version of the PSO algorithm achieves notably better forecasting accuracies than the standard Backpropagation (BP) training method for both FANN and EANN models. The neural network forecasting results are also compared with those from the three traditional statistical models, viz. Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA), Holt-Winters (HW) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The comparison demonstrates that both PSO and BP based neural networks outperform SARIMA, HW and SVM models for all three time series datasets. The forecasting performances of ANNs are further improved through combining the outputs from the three PSO based models.Comment: 4 figures, 4 tables, 31 references, conference proceeding

Using Recurrent Neural Networks To Forecasting of Forex

This paper reports empirical evidence that a neural networks model is applicable to the statistically reliable prediction of foreign exchange rates. Time series data and technical indicators such as moving average, are fed to neural nets to capture the underlying "rules" of the movement in currency exchange rates. The trained recurrent neural networks forecast the exchange rates between American Dollar and four other major currencies, Japanese Yen, Swiss Frank, British Pound and EURO. Various statistical estimates of forecast quality have been carried out. Obtained results show, that neural networks are able to give forecast with coefficient of multiple determination not worse then 0.65. Linear and nonlinear statistical data preprocessing, such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Hurst exponents for each currency were calculated and analyzed.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure

Wind energy forecasting with neural networks: a literature review

Renewable energy is intermittent by nature and to integrate this energy into the Grid while assuring safety and stability the accurate forecasting of there newable energy generation is critical. Wind Energy prediction is based on the ability to forecast wind. There are many methods for wind forecasting based on the statistical properties of the wind time series and in the integration of meteorological information, these methods are being used commercially around the world. But one family of new methods for wind power fore castingis surging based on Machine Learning Deep Learning techniques. This paper analyses the characteristics of the Wind Speed time series data and performs a literature review of recently published works of wind power forecasting using Machine Learning approaches (neural and deep learning networks), which have been published in the last few years.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Forecasting in Big Data Environments: an Adaptable and Automated Shrinkage Estimation of Neural Networks (AAShNet)

This paper considers improved forecasting in possibly nonlinear dynamic settings, with high-dimension predictors ("big data" environments). To overcome the curse of dimensionality and manage data and model complexity, we examine shrinkage estimation of a back-propagation algorithm of a deep neural net with skip-layer connections. We expressly include both linear and nonlinear components. This is a high-dimensional learning approach including both sparsity L1 and smoothness L2 penalties, allowing high-dimensionality and nonlinearity to be accommodated in one step. This approach selects significant predictors as well as the topology of the neural network. We estimate optimal values of shrinkage hyperparameters by incorporating a gradient-based optimization technique resulting in robust predictions with improved reproducibility. The latter has been an issue in some approaches. This is statistically interpretable and unravels some network structure, commonly left to a black box. An additional advantage is that the nonlinear part tends to get pruned if the underlying process is linear. In an application to forecasting equity returns, the proposed approach captures nonlinear dynamics between equities to enhance forecast performance. It offers an appreciable improvement over current univariate and multivariate models by RMSE and actual portfolio performance