to

Probabilistic structure discovery in time series data

Existing methods for structure discovery in time series data construct interpretable, compositional kernels for Gaussian process regression models. While the learned Gaussian process model provides posterior mean and variance estimates, typically the structure is learned via a greedy optimization procedure. This restricts the space of possible solutions and leads to over-confident uncertainty estimates. We introduce a fully Bayesian approach, inferring a full posterior over structures, which more reliably captures the uncertainty of the model.

Scaling up the Automatic Statistician: Scalable Structure Discovery using Gaussian Processes

Automating statistical modelling is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence. The Automatic Statistician takes a first step in this direction, by employing a kernel search algorithm with Gaussian Processes (GP) to provide interpretable statistical models for regression problems. However this does not scale due to its $O(N^3)$ running time for the model selection. We propose Scalable Kernel Composition (SKC), a scalable kernel search algorithm that extends the Automatic Statistician to bigger data sets. In doing so, we derive a cheap upper bound on the GP marginal likelihood that sandwiches the marginal likelihood with the variational lower bound . We show that the upper bound is significantly tighter than the lower bound and thus useful for model selection.

Discovering Explainable Latent Covariance Structure for Multiple Time Series

Analyzing time series data is important to predict future events and changes in finance, manufacturing, and administrative decisions. Gaussian processes (GPs) solve regression and classification problems by choosing appropriate kernels capturing covariance structure of data. In time series analysis, GP based regression methods recently demonstrate competitive performance by decomposing temporal covariance structure. Such covariance structure decomposition allows exploiting shared parameters over a set of multiple but selected time series. In this paper, we handle multiple time series by placing an Indian Buffet Process (IBP) prior on the presence of shared kernels. We investigate the validity of model when infinite latent components are introduced. We also propose an improved search algorithm to find interpretable kernels among multiple time series along with comparison reports. Experiments are conducted on both synthetic data sets and real world data sets, showing promising results in term of structure discoveries and predictive performances.

Fourier Feature Approximations for Periodic Kernels in Time-Series Modelling

Gaussian Processes (GPs) provide an extremely powerful mechanism to model a variety of problems but incur an O(N 3 ) complexity in the number of data samples. Common approximation methods rely on what are often termed inducing points but still typically incur an O(NM 2 ) complexity in the data and corresponding inducing points. Using Random Fourier Feature (RFF) maps, we overcome this by transforming the problem into a Bayesian Linear Regression formulation upon which we apply a Bayesian Variational treatment that also allows learning the corresponding kernel hyperparameters, likelihood and noise parameters. In this paper we introduce an alternative method using Fourier series to obtain spectral representations of common kernels, in particular for periodic warpings, which surprisingly have a convergent, non-random form using special functions, requiring fewer spectral features to approximate their corresponding kernel to high accuracy. Using this, we can fuse the Random Fourier Feature spectral representations of common kernels with their periodic counterparts to show how they can more effectively and expressively learn patterns in time-series for both interpolation and extrapolation. This method combines robustness, scalability and equally importantly, interpretability through a symbolic declarative grammar that is both functionally and humanly intuitive — a property that is crucial for explainable decision making. Using probabilistic programming and Variational Inference we are able to efficiently optimise over these rich functional representations. We show significantly improved Gram matrix approximation errors, and also demonstrate the method in several time-series problems comparing other commonly used approaches such as recurrent neural networks.

Time Series Cluster Kernel for Learning Similarities between Multivariate Time Series with Missing Data

Similarity-based approaches represent a promising direction for time series analysis. However, many such methods rely on parameter tuning, and some have shortcomings if the time series are multivariate (MTS), due to dependencies between attributes, or the time series contain missing data. In this paper, we address these challenges within the powerful context of kernel methods by proposing the robust \emph{time series cluster kernel} (TCK). The approach taken leverages the missing data handling properties of Gaussian mixture models (GMM) augmented with informative prior distributions. An ensemble learning approach is exploited to ensure robustness to parameters by combining the clustering results of many GMM to form the final kernel. We evaluate the TCK on synthetic and real data and compare to other state-of-the-art techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that the TCK is robust to parameter choices, provides competitive results for MTS without missing data and outstanding results for missing data.