Performance evaluation of weights selection schemes for linear combination of multiple forecasts

Time series modeling and forecasting are essential in many domains of science and engineering. Extensive works in literature suggest that combining outputs of different forecasting methods substantially increases the overall accuracies as well as reduces the risk of model selection. The most popular method of forecasts combination is the weighted averaging of the constituent forecasts. The effectiveness of this method solely depends on appropriate selection of the combining weights. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate a wide variety of benchmark weights selection techniques for linear combination of multiple forecasts in terms of their prediction accuracies. Nine real-world time series from different domains and five individual forecasting methods are used in our empirical work. A robust scheme is also suggested for fairly ranking the combination methods on the basis of their forecasting performances. Our study precisely demonstrates the relative strengths and weaknesses of various benchmark linear combination techniques which evidently can be of much practical importance.     

周相似特性下交通流组合预测方法研究

根据交通流量具有周相似的特性,构造了周相似序列。用霍特指数平滑法对周相似序列进行预测,用人工神经网络对残差部分进行预测。将指数平滑法与神经网络法相结合,以便发挥每种方法的优势,获得比单个方法更好的预测结果。实例分析表明,比单独使用ARIMA或单独使用神经网络方法,使用组合方法的预测误差最小,适合于实时的交通流预测。     

Combining Global Antithetic Forecasts

This paper provides a summary of the theory for antithetic forecasting, and an empirical exposition. An original forecast is combined with another forecast, produced from a time series which is antithetic (negatively correlated) to the original time series. The forecasts are combined via a linear projection of the antithetic series on the original series, such that the component forecasts have negatively correlated errors. Large-scale empirical tests and benchmark comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of combining antithetic forecasts, even as these data depart from the strict theoretical lognormality requirement of antithetic forecasting. The method is illustrated in detail, using a real time series. Antithetic forecasting is the first combining method in which the gain increases with the forecast horizon.     

A comparison of neural networks and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems for the prediction of water diffusion through carbon nanotubes

Given the fact that artificial intelligence tools such as neural network and fuzzy logic are capable of learning and inferencing from the past to capture the patterns that exist in the data, this study presents an intelligent method for the forecasting of water diffusion through carbon nanotubes where predictions are generated from neuro-fuzzy structures using molecular dynamics data. Therefore, this research was mainly focused on combining molecular dynamics with artificial intelligence methods in order to reduce the computational time of biomolecular and nanofluidic simulations. Two different artificial intelligence methods are applied for the time-dependent water diffusion forecasting: artificial neural network (ANN) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFISs). The effects of different sizes of training sample sets on forecasting performance of ANN and ANFIS are investigated as well. Four different evaluation methods are used to measure the performance and forecasting accuracy of these two methods. As a result, ANFIS presents the higher accuracy than neural network method based on the comparison of these different evaluation methods adopted in this research. The results reported in this research demonstrate that combining of molecular dynamics with artificial intelligence methods can be one of the most powerful and beneficial tools for prediction of important nanofluidic parameters.     

A combination of artificial neural network and random walk models for financial time series forecasting

Properly comprehending and modeling the dynamics of financial data has indispensable practical importance. The prime goal of a financial time series model is to provide reliable future forecasts which are crucial for investment planning, fiscal risk hedging, governmental policy making, etc. These time series often exhibit notoriously haphazard movements which make the task of modeling and forecasting extremely difficult. As per the research evidence, the random walk (RW) is so far the best linear model for forecasting financial data. Artificial neural network (ANN) is another promising alternative with the unique capability of nonlinear self-adaptive modeling. Numerous comparisons of the performances of RW and ANN models have also been carried out in the literature with mixed conclusions. In this paper, we propose a combination methodology which attempts to benefit from the strengths of both RW and ANN models. In our proposed approach, the linear part of a financial dataset is processed through the RW model, and the remaining nonlinear residuals are processed using an ensemble of feedforward ANN (FANN) and Elman ANN (EANN) models. The forecasting ability of the proposed scheme is examined on four real-world financial time series in terms of three popular error statistics. The obtained results clearly demonstrate that our combination method achieves reasonably better forecasting accuracies than each of RW, FANN and EANN models in isolation for all four financial time series.     

ANNSTLF-a neural-network-based electric load forecasting system

A key component of the daily operation and planning activities of an electric utility is short-term load forecasting, i.e., the prediction of hourly loads (demand) for the next hour to several days out. The accuracy of such forecasts has significant economic impact for the utility. This paper describes a load forecasting system known as ANNSTLF (artificial neural-network short-term load forecaster) which has received wide acceptance by the electric utility industry and presently is being used by 32 utilities across the USA and Canada. ANNSTLF can consider the effect of temperature and relative humidity on the load. Besides its load forecasting engine, ANNSTLF contains forecasters that can generate the hourly temperature and relative humidity forecasts needed by the system. ANNSTLF is based on a multiple ANN strategy that captures various trends in the data. Both the first and the second generation of the load forecasting engine are discussed and compared. The building block of the forecasters is a multilayer perceptron trained with the error backpropagation learning rule. An adaptive scheme is employed to adjust the ANN weights during online forecasting. The forecasting models are site independent and only the number of hidden layer nodes of ANN's need to be adjusted for a new database. The results of testing the system on data from ten different utilities are reported.     

Forecasting time series using a methodology based on autoregressive integrated moving average and genetic programming

The autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), which is a conventional statistical method, is employed in many fields to construct models for forecasting time series. Although ARIMA can be adopted to obtain a highly accurate linear forecasting model, it cannot accurately forecast nonlinear time series. Artificial neural network (ANN) can be utilized to construct more accurate forecasting model than ARIMA for nonlinear time series, but explaining the meaning of the hidden layers of ANN is difficult and, moreover, it does not yield a mathematical equation. This study proposes a hybrid forecasting model for nonlinear time series by combining ARIMA with genetic programming (GP) to improve upon both the ANN and the ARIMA forecasting models. Finally, some real data sets are adopted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed forecasting model.     

Hybrid neural network models for hydrologic time series forecasting

The need for increased accuracies in time series forecasting has motivated the researchers to develop innovative models. In this paper, a new hybrid time series neural network model is proposed that is capable of exploiting the strengths of traditional time series approaches and artificial neural networks (ANNs). The proposed approach consists of an overall modelling framework, which is a combination of the conventional and ANN techniques. The steps involved in the time series analysis, e.g. de-trending and de-seasonalisation, can be carried out before gradually presenting the modified time series data to the ANN. The proposed hybrid approach for time series forecasting is tested using the monthly streamflow data at Colorado River at Lees Ferry, USA. Specifically, results from four time series models of auto-regressive (AR) type and four ANN models are presented. The results obtained in this study suggest that the approach of combining the strengths of the conventional and ANN techniques provides a robust modelling framework capable of capturing the non-linear nature of the complex time series and thus producing more accurate forecasts. Although the proposed hybrid neural network models are applied in hydrology in this study, they have tremendous scope for application in a wide range of areas for achieving increased accuracies in time series forecasting.     

基于模糊推理系统的非线性组合建模与预测方法研究

基于模糊推理系统在紧支集中能够逼近任意非线性连续函数的特性,提出了一种基于Takagi-sugeno模糊规则基的非线性组合建模与预测新方法,以克服线性组合预测方法在解决非平衡时间序列组合建模问题所遇到的困难和存在的不足,并给出了相应的基于学习自动机层次结构的优化算法确定模糊系统的参数和模糊子集的划分,理论分析和大量的经济预测实例表明：该方法具有很强的学习与泛化能力,在处理诸如经济时间序列这种具有一定程度不确定性的非线性系统组合建模与预测方法有很好的应用。     

An investigation and comparison of artificial neural network and time series models for Chinese food grain price forecasting

This paper compares the predictive performance of ARIMA, artificial neural network and the linear combination models for forecasting wheat price in Chinese market. Empirical results show that the combined model can improve the forecasting performance significantly in contrast with its counterparts in terms of the error evaluation measurements. However, as far as turning points and profit criterions are concerned, the ANN model is best as well as at capturing a significant number of turning points. The results are conflicting when implementing dissimilar forecasting criteria (the quantitative and the turning points measurements) to evaluate the performance of three models. The ANN model is overall the best model, and can be used as an alternative method to model Chinese future food grain price.     

Forecast Combination by Using Artificial Neural Networks

One of the efficient ways for obtaining accurate forecasts is usage of forecast combination method. This approach consists of combining different forecast values obtained from different forecasting models. Also artificial neural networks and fuzzy time series approaches have proved their success in the field of forecasting. In this study, a new forecast combination approach based on artificial neural networks is proposed. The forecasts obtain from different fuzzy time series models are combined by utilizing artificial neural networks. The proposed method is applied to index of Istanbul stock exchange (IMKB) time series and the results are compared to other forecast combination methods available in the literature. As a result of the implementation, it is seen that the proposed forecast combination approach produces better forecasts than those produced by other methods.     

Combination of artificial neural-network forecasters for predictionof natural gas consumption

The focus of this paper is on combination of artificial neural-network (ANN) forecasters with application to the prediction of daily natural gas consumption needed by gas utilities. ANN forecasters can model the complex relationship between weather parameters and previous gas consumption with the future consumption. A two-stage system is proposed with the first stage containing two ANN forecasters, a multilayer feedforward ANN and a functional link ANN. These forecasters are initially trained with the error backpropagation algorithm, but an adaptive strategy is employed to adjust their weights during online forecasting. The second stage consists of a combination module to mix the two individual forecasts produced in the first stage. Eight different combination algorithms are examined, they are based on: averaging, recursive least squares, fuzzy logic, feedforward ANN, functional link ANN, temperature space approach, Karmarkar's linear programming algorithm (1984) and adaptive mixture of local experts (modular neural networks). The performance is tested on real data from six different gas utilities. The results indicate that combination strategies based on a single ANN outperform the other approaches.     

A new architecture selection method based on tabu search for artificial neural networks

Artificial neural networks (ANN) have been used in various applications in recent years. One of these applications is time series forecasting. Although ANN produces accurate forecasts in many time series implementations, there are still some problems with using ANN. ANN consist of some components such as architecture structure, learning algorithm and activation function. These components have important effect on the performance of ANN. An important decision is the selection of architecture structure that consists of determining the numbers of neurons in the layers of a network. Therefore, various approaches have been proposed to determine the best ANN architecture in the literature. However, the most preferred method is still trial and error method for finding a good architecture. In this study, a new architecture selection method based on tabu search algorithm is proposed. In the implementation, five real time series are analyzed by using ANN and the proposed method is employed to select the best architecture. For the comparison, these time series are also forecasted by using ANN when trial and error method is utilized to determine the best architecture. As a result of the implementation, it is clearly seen that better results are obtained when the proposed method is used for the selection of architecture.     

一种基于数据融合和方法融合的时空综合预测算法

时空数据挖掘是数据挖掘中的重要研究内容,其中时空预测的应用领域最为广泛．针对目前时空预测方法中的不足,提出了一种基于数据融合和方法融合的时空综合预测算法．该方法首先采用统计学原理对目标对象本身的时序进行预测;然后通过神经网络解算相邻对象的空间影响,继而对混合数据序列使用时空自回归预测模型;最后使用线性回归将单个的时间预测、空间预测和时空预测有效地融合在一起,得到综合预测结果．应用该方法预测铁路客流,突破了传统铁路客流预测方法的局限,实验结果表明了算法的有效性．     

A linear hybrid methodology for improving accuracy of time series forecasting

Modeling and forecasting of time series data are integral parts of many scientific and engineering applications. Increasing precision of the performed forecasts is highly desirable but a difficult task, facing a number of mathematical as well as decision-making challenges. This paper presents a novel approach for linearly combining multiple models in order to improve time series forecasting accuracy. Our approach is based on the assumption that each future observation of a time series is a linear combination of the arithmetic mean and median of the forecasts from all participated models together with a random noise. The proposed ensemble is constructed with five different forecasting models and is tested on six real-world time series. Obtained results demonstrate that the forecasting accuracies are significantly improved through our combination mechanism. A nonparametric statistical analysis is also carried out to show the superior forecasting performances of the proposed ensemble scheme over the individual models as well as a number of other forecast combination techniques.     

基于Lasso与禁忌搜索的患者检查需求预测

对住院患者图像检查需求预测问题进行了研究.为有效应对需求影响因素较多,采用Lasso降维减少模型输入变量;基于多元线性回归、BP神经网络和多元自回归差分移动平均模型(ARIMAX)等常用患者需求预测方法构建组合预测方法;为解决传统组合预测方法难以同时考虑多个性能指标的问题,基于线性加权组合预测思路,提出了基于禁忌搜索的...     

Evolutionary optimization of sparsely connected and time-lagged neural networks for time series forecasting

Time series forecasting (TSF) is an important tool to support decision making (e.g., planning production resources). Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are innate candidates for TSF due to advantages such as nonlinear learning and noise tolerance. However, the search for the best model is a complex task that highly affects the forecasting performance. In this work, we propose two novel evolutionary artificial neural networks (EANNs) approaches for TSF based on an estimation distribution algorithm (EDA) search engine. The first new approach consist of sparsely connected evolutionary ANN (SEANN), which evolves more flexible ANN structures to perform multi-step ahead forecasts. The second one, consists of an automatic Time lag feature selection EANN (TEANN) approach that evolves not only ANN parameters (e.g., input and hidden nodes, training parameters) but also which set of time lags are fed into the forecasting model. Several experiments were held, using a set of six time series, from different real-world domains. Also, two error metrics (i.e., mean squared error and symmetric mean absolute percentage error) were analyzed. The two EANN approaches were compared against a base EANN (with no ANN structure or time lag optimization) and four other methods (autoregressive integrated moving average method, random forest, echo state network and support vector machine). Overall, the proposed SEANN and TEANN methods obtained the best forecasting results. Moreover, they favor simpler neural network models, thus requiring less computational effort when compared with the base EANN.     

基于不同误差准则和范数的组合预测方法研究

本文研究组合预测方法问题。基于绝对误差和相对误差准则以及不同的范数性能指标，文中系统地描述了六种不同的组合预测方法，并给出其统一的线性规划算法和仿真实例。     

A moving-average filter based hybrid ARIMA–ANN model for forecasting time series data

A suitable combination of linear and nonlinear models provides a more accurate prediction model than an individual linear or nonlinear model for forecasting time series data originating from various applications. The linear autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and nonlinear artificial neural network (ANN) models are explored in this paper to devise a new hybrid ARIMA–ANN model for the prediction of time series data. Many of the hybrid ARIMA–ANN models which exist in the literature apply an ARIMA model to given time series data, consider the error between the original and the ARIMA-predicted data as a nonlinear component, and model it using an ANN in different ways. Though these models give predictions with higher accuracy than the individual models, there is scope for further improvement in the accuracy if the nature of the given time series is taken into account before applying the models. In the work described in this paper, the nature of volatility was explored using a moving-average filter, and then an ARIMA and an ANN model were suitably applied. Using a simulated data set and experimental data sets such as sunspot data, electricity price data, and stock market data, the proposed hybrid ARIMA–ANN model was applied along with individual ARIMA and ANN models and some existing hybrid ARIMA–ANN models. The results obtained from all of these data sets show that for both one-step-ahead and multistep-ahead forecasts, the proposed hybrid model has higher prediction accuracy.     

A hybrid optimized error correction system for time series forecasting

Time series forecasting is a challenging task in machine learning. Real world time series are often composed by linear and nonlinear structures which need to be mapped by some forecasting method. Linear methods such as autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and nonlinear methods such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) could be employed to handle such problems, however model misspecification hinders the forecasting process producing inaccurate models. Hybrid models based on error forecasting and combination can reduce the misspecification of single models and improve the accuracy of the system. This work proposes a hybrid system that is composed of three parts: a) linear modeling of the time series, b) nonlinear modeling of the error series, and c) combination of the forecasts using three distinct approaches. The system performs a search for the best parameters of the linear and nonlinear components, and of the combination approaches. Particle swarm optimization is used to find suitable architecture and weights. Experiments show that the proposed technique achieved promising results in time series forecasting.