论文标题

预测:多样性很重要

Forecast with Forecasts: Diversity Matters

论文作者

Kang, Yanfei, Cao, Wei, Petropoulos, Fotios, Li, Feng

论文摘要

在过去的几十年中,预测组合已被广泛应用,以改善预测。估计可以胜过简单平均值的最佳权重并不总是一件容易的事。近年来,将时间序列特征用于预测组合的想法蓬勃发展。尽管这一想法在几项预测竞赛中被证明是有益的,但在许多情况下,这可能是不可行的。例如,选择适当的功能以构建预测模型的任务通常具有挑战性。即使有一种可接受的方法来定义这些功能,也会根据历史模式估算现有特征,这些特征可能会在未来发生变化。其他时候,由于历史数据有限,对特征的估计是不可行的。在这项工作中,我们建议将重点从历史数据变为提取功能的预测。我们使用样本外预测来通过扩增要组合的方法池的多样性来获得预测组合的权重。丰富的时间序列用于评估所提出方法的性能。实验结果表明,我们基于多样性的预测组合框架不仅简化了建模过程,而且还可以在点预测和预测间隔方面取得了卓越的预测性能。我们命题的价值在于它的简单性,透明度和计算效率,这些要素从优化和决策分析的角度都很重要。

Forecast combinations have been widely applied in the last few decades to improve forecasting. Estimating optimal weights that can outperform simple averages is not always an easy task. In recent years, the idea of using time series features for forecast combination has flourished. Although this idea has been proved to be beneficial in several forecasting competitions, it may not be practical in many situations. For example, the task of selecting appropriate features to build forecasting models is often challenging. Even if there was an acceptable way to define the features, existing features are estimated based on the historical patterns, which are likely to change in the future. Other times, the estimation of the features is infeasible due to limited historical data. In this work, we suggest a change of focus from the historical data to the produced forecasts to extract features. We use out-of-sample forecasts to obtain weights for forecast combinations by amplifying the diversity of the pool of methods being combined. A rich set of time series is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that our diversity-based forecast combination framework not only simplifies the modelling process but also achieves superior forecasting performance in terms of both point forecasts and prediction intervals. The value of our proposition lies on its simplicity, transparency, and computational efficiency, elements that are important from both an optimisation and a decision analysis perspective.

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