Prediction of hierarchical time series using structured regularization and its application to artificial neural networks.
Journal:
PloS one
Published Date:
Nov 12, 2020
Abstract
This paper discusses the prediction of hierarchical time series, where each upper-level time series is calculated by summing appropriate lower-level time series. Forecasts for such hierarchical time series should be coherent, meaning that the forecast for an upper-level time series equals the sum of forecasts for corresponding lower-level time series. Previous methods for making coherent forecasts consist of two phases: first computing base (incoherent) forecasts and then reconciling those forecasts based on their inherent hierarchical structure. To improve time series predictions, we propose a structured regularization method for completing both phases simultaneously. The proposed method is based on a prediction model for bottom-level time series and uses a structured regularization term to incorporate upper-level forecasts into the prediction model. We also develop a backpropagation algorithm specialized for applying our method to artificial neural networks for time series prediction. Experimental results using synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is comparable in terms of prediction accuracy and computational efficiency to other methods for time series prediction.