Time series forecasting is essential for decision making in many domains. In this work, we address the challenge of predicting prices evolution among multiple potentially interacting financial assets. A solution to this problem has obvious importance for governments, banks, and investors. Statistical methods such as Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) are widely applied to these problems. In this paper, we propose to approach economic time series forecasting of multiple financial assets in a novel way via video prediction. Given past prices of multiple potentially interacting financial assets, we aim to predict the prices evolution in the future. Instead of treating the snapshot of prices at each time point as a vector, we spatially layout these prices in 2D as an image, such that we can harness the power of CNNs in learning a latent representation for these financial assets. Thus, the history of these prices becomes a sequence of images, and our goal becomes predicting future images. We build on a state-of-the-art video prediction method for forecasting future images. Our experiments involve the prediction task of the price evolution of nine financial assets traded in U.S. stock markets. The proposed method outperforms baselines including ARIMA, Prophet, and variations of the proposed method, demonstrating the benefits of harnessing the power of CNNs in the problem of economic time series forecasting.
Among various soft computing approaches for time series forecasting, Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) have shown remarkable results as a tool to model and analyze the dynamics of complex systems. FCM have similarities to recurrent neural networks and can be classified as a neuro-fuzzy method. In other words, FCMs are a mixture of fuzzy logic, neural network, and expert system aspects, which act as a powerful tool for simulating and studying the dynamic behavior of complex systems. The most interesting features are knowledge interpretability, dynamic characteristics and learning capability. The goal of this survey paper is mainly to present an overview on the most relevant and recent FCM-based time series forecasting models proposed in the literature. In addition, this article considers an introduction on the fundamentals of FCM model and learning methodologies. Also, this survey provides some ideas for future research to enhance the capabilities of FCM in order to cover some challenges in the real-world experiments such as handling non-stationary data and scalability issues. Moreover, equipping FCMs with fast learning algorithms is one of the major concerns in this area.
A functional dynamic factor model for time-dependent functional data is proposed. We decompose a functional time series into a predictive low-dimensional common component consisting of a finite number of factors and an infinite-dimensional idiosyncratic component that has no predictive power. The conditions under which all model parameters, including the number of factors, become identifiable are discussed. Our identification results lead to a simple-to-use two-stage estimation procedure based on functional principal components. As part of our estimation procedure, we solve the separation problem between the common and idiosyncratic functional components. In particular, we obtain a consistent information criterion that provides joint estimates of the number of factors and dynamic lags of the common component. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of our method in a simulation study and to the problem of modeling and predicting yield curves. In an out-of-sample experiment, we demonstrate that our model performs well compared to the widely used term structure Nelson-Siegel model for yield curves.
In business retention, churn prevention has always been a major concern. This work contributes to this domain by formalizing the problem of churn prediction in the context of online gambling as a binary classification task. We also propose an algorithmic answer to this problem based on recurrent neural network. This algorithm is tested with online gambling data that have the form of time series, which can be efficiently processed by recurrent neural networks. To evaluate the performances of the trained models, standard machine learning metrics were used, such as accuracy, precision and recall. For this problem in particular, the conducted experiments allowed to assess that the choice of a specific architecture depends on the metric which is given the greatest importance. Architectures using nBRC favour precision, those using LSTM give better recall, while GRU-based architectures allow a higher accuracy and balance two other metrics. Moreover, further experiments showed that using only the more recent time-series histories to train the networks decreases the quality of the results. We also study the performances of models learned at a specific instant $t$, at other times $t^{\prime} > t$. The results show that the performances of the models learned at time $t$ remain good at the following instants $t^{\prime} > t$, suggesting that there is no need to refresh the models at a high rate. However, the performances of the models were subject to noticeable variance due to one-off events impacting the data.
Travel time is a crucial measure in transportation. Accurate travel time prediction is also fundamental for operation and advanced information systems. A variety of solutions exist for short-term travel time predictions such as solutions that utilize real-time GPS data and optimization methods to track the path of a vehicle. However, reliable long-term predictions remain challenging. We show in this paper the applicability and usefulness of travel time i.e. delivery time prediction for postal services. We investigate several methods such as linear regression models and tree based ensembles such as random forest, bagging, and boosting, that allow to predict delivery time by conducting extensive experiments and considering many usability scenarios. Results reveal that travel time prediction can help mitigate high delays in postal services. We show that some boosting algorithms, such as light gradient boosting and catboost, have a higher performance in terms of accuracy and runtime efficiency than other baselines such as linear regression models, bagging regressor and random forest.
Spatio-temporal forecasting has numerous applications in analyzing wireless, traffic, and financial networks. Many classical statistical models often fall short in handling the complexity and high non-linearity present in time-series data. Recent advances in deep learning allow for better modelling of spatial and temporal dependencies. While most of these models focus on obtaining accurate point forecasts, they do not characterize the prediction uncertainty. In this work, we consider the time-series data as a random realization from a nonlinear state-space model and target Bayesian inference of the hidden states for probabilistic forecasting. We use particle flow as the tool for approximating the posterior distribution of the states, as it is shown to be highly effective in complex, high-dimensional settings. Thorough experimentation on several real world time-series datasets demonstrates that our approach provides better characterization of uncertainty while maintaining comparable accuracy to the state-of-the art point forecasting methods.
Compared with single-label image classification, multi-label image classification is more practical and challenging. Some recent studies attempted to leverage the semantic information of categories for improving multi-label image classification performance. However, these semantic-based methods only take semantic information as type of complements for visual representation without further exploitation. In this paper, we present a innovative path towards the solution of the multi-label image classification which considers it as a dictionary learning task. A novel end-to-end model named Deep Semantic Dictionary Learning (DSDL) is designed. In DSDL, an auto-encoder is applied to generate the semantic dictionary from class-level semantics and then such dictionary is utilized for representing the visual features extracted by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with label embeddings. The DSDL provides a simple but elegant way to exploit and reconcile the label, semantic and visual spaces simultaneously via conducting the dictionary learning among them. Moreover, inspired by iterative optimization of traditional dictionary learning, we further devise a novel training strategy named Alternately Parameters Update Strategy (APUS) for optimizing DSDL, which alteratively optimizes the representation coefficients and the semantic dictionary in forward and backward propagation. Extensive experimental results on three popular benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves promising performances in comparison with the state-of-the-arts. Our codes and models are available at //github.com/ZFT-CQU/DSDL.
The accurate and interpretable prediction of future events in time-series data often requires the capturing of representative patterns (or referred to as states) underpinning the observed data. To this end, most existing studies focus on the representation and recognition of states, but ignore the changing transitional relations among them. In this paper, we present evolutionary state graph, a dynamic graph structure designed to systematically represent the evolving relations (edges) among states (nodes) along time. We conduct analysis on the dynamic graphs constructed from the time-series data and show that changes on the graph structures (e.g., edges connecting certain state nodes) can inform the occurrences of events (i.e., time-series fluctuation). Inspired by this, we propose a novel graph neural network model, Evolutionary State Graph Network (EvoNet), to encode the evolutionary state graph for accurate and interpretable time-series event prediction. Specifically, Evolutionary State Graph Network models both the node-level (state-to-state) and graph-level (segment-to-segment) propagation, and captures the node-graph (state-to-segment) interactions over time. Experimental results based on five real-world datasets show that our approach not only achieves clear improvements compared with 11 baselines, but also provides more insights towards explaining the results of event predictions.
With the advent of deep learning, many dense prediction tasks, i.e. tasks that produce pixel-level predictions, have seen significant performance improvements. The typical approach is to learn these tasks in isolation, that is, a separate neural network is trained for each individual task. Yet, recent multi-task learning (MTL) techniques have shown promising results w.r.t. performance, computations and/or memory footprint, by jointly tackling multiple tasks through a learned shared representation. In this survey, we provide a well-rounded view on state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for MTL in computer vision, explicitly emphasizing on dense prediction tasks. Our contributions concern the following. First, we consider MTL from a network architecture point-of-view. We include an extensive overview and discuss the advantages/disadvantages of recent popular MTL models. Second, we examine various optimization methods to tackle the joint learning of multiple tasks. We summarize the qualitative elements of these works and explore their commonalities and differences. Finally, we provide an extensive experimental evaluation across a variety of dense prediction benchmarks to examine the pros and cons of the different methods, including both architectural and optimization based strategies.
Multivariate time series forecasting is extensively studied throughout the years with ubiquitous applications in areas such as finance, traffic, environment, etc. Still, concerns have been raised on traditional methods for incapable of modeling complex patterns or dependencies lying in real word data. To address such concerns, various deep learning models, mainly Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods, are proposed. Nevertheless, capturing extremely long-term patterns while effectively incorporating information from other variables remains a challenge for time-series forecasting. Furthermore, lack-of-explainability remains one serious drawback for deep neural network models. Inspired by Memory Network proposed for solving the question-answering task, we propose a deep learning based model named Memory Time-series network (MTNet) for time series forecasting. MTNet consists of a large memory component, three separate encoders, and an autoregressive component to train jointly. Additionally, the attention mechanism designed enable MTNet to be highly interpretable. We can easily tell which part of the historic data is referenced the most.
Networks provide a powerful formalism for modeling complex systems, by representing the underlying set of pairwise interactions. But much of the structure within these systems involves interactions that take place among more than two nodes at once; for example, communication within a group rather than person-to-person, collaboration among a team rather than a pair of co-authors, or biological interaction between a set of molecules rather than just two. We refer to these type of simultaneous interactions on sets of more than two nodes as higher-order interactions; they are ubiquitous, but the empirical study of them has lacked a general framework for evaluating higher-order models. Here we introduce such a framework, based on link prediction, a fundamental problem in network analysis. The traditional link prediction problem seeks to predict the appearance of new links in a network, and here we adapt it to predict which (larger) sets of elements will have future interactions. We study the temporal evolution of 19 datasets from a variety of domains, and use our higher-order formulation of link prediction to assess the types of structural features that are most predictive of new multi-way interactions. Among our results, we find that different domains vary considerably in their distribution of higher-order structural parameters, and that the higher-order link prediction problem exhibits some fundamental differences from traditional pairwise link prediction, with a greater role for local rather than long-range information in predicting the appearance of new interactions.