Envision an intelligent agent capable of assisting users in conducting forecasting tasks through intuitive, natural conversations, without requiring in-depth knowledge of the underlying machine learning (ML) processes. A significant challenge for the agent in this endeavor is to accurately comprehend the user's prediction goals and, consequently, formulate precise ML tasks. In this paper, we take a pioneering step towards this ambitious goal by introducing a new concept called Forecast Utterance and then focus on the automatic and accurate interpretation of users' prediction goals from these utterances. Specifically, we frame the task as a slot-filling problem, where each slot corresponds to a specific aspect of the goal prediction task. We then employ two zero-shot methods for solving the slot-filling task, namely: 1) Entity Extraction (EE), and 2) Question-Answering (QA) techniques. Our experiments, conducted with three meticulously crafted data sets, validate the viability of our ambitious goal and demonstrate the effectiveness of both EE and QA techniques in interpreting Forecast Utterances.

When I first saw a time series forecasting problem I was very confused. Until that moment, I just did some supervised learning predictions on tabular data so I didn't know how to do the forecastings if I didn't have the target values. I decided to write about the machine learning approach of solving time series problems because I believe that these models are very versatile and powerful and they're much more beginner friendly than other statistical approaches. We are going to use Kaggle's Bike Sharing Demand competition dataset because it suites perfectly for this tutorial. Before using any model, it's important to do some time series analysis to understand the data.

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks have been widely used for time series forecasting problems. However, LSTMs are prone to overfitting and performance reduction during test phases. Several different regularization techniques have been shown in literature to prevent overfitting problems in neural networks. In this paper, first, we introduce application of kernel flow methods for time series forecasting in general. Afterward, we examine the effectiveness of applying kernel flow regularization on LSTM layers to avoid overfitting problems. We describe a regularization method by applying kernel flow loss function on LSTM layers. In experimental results, we show that kernel flow outperforms baseline models on time series forecasting benchmarks. We also compare the effect of dropout and kernel flow regularization techniques on LSTMs. The experimental results illustrate that kernel flow achieves similar regularization effect to dropout. It also shows that the best results is obtained using both kernel flow and dropout regularizations with early stopping on LSTM layers on some time series datasets (e.g. power-load demand forecasts).

Spatial time series forecasting problems arise in a broad range of applications, such as environmental and transportation problems. These problems are challenging because of the existence of specific spatial, short-term and long-term patterns, and the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network framework for large-scale spatial time series forecasting problems. We explicitly designed the neural network architecture for capturing various types of patterns. In preprocessing, a time series decomposition method is applied to separately feed short-term, long-term and spatial patterns into different components of a neural network. A fuzzy clustering method finds cluster of neighboring time series based on similarity of time series residuals; as they can be meaningful short-term patterns for spatial time series. In neural network architecture, each kernel of a multi-kernel convolution layer is applied to a cluster of time series to extract short-term features in neighboring areas. The output of convolution layer is concatenated by trends and followed by convolution-LSTM layer to capture long-term patterns in larger regional areas. To make a robust prediction when faced with missing data, an unsupervised pretrained denoising autoencoder reconstructs the output of the model in a fine-tuning step. The experimental results illustrate the model outperforms baseline and state of the art models in a traffic flow prediction dataset.

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You do not have to model your time series forecast problem as-is. There are many ways to reframe your forecast problem that can both simplify the prediction problem and potentially expose more or different information to be modeled. A reframing can ultimately result in better and/or more robust forecasts. In this tutorial, you will discover how to reframe your time series forecast problem with Python. How to Reframe Your Time Series Forecasting Problem Photo by Sean MacEntee, some rights reserved.

You do not have to model your time series forecast problem as-is. There are many ways to reframe your forecast problem that can both simplify the prediction problem and potentially expose more or different information to be modeled. A reframing can ultimately result in better and/or more robust forecasts. In this tutorial, you will discover how to reframe your time series forecast problem with Python. How to Reframe Your Time Series Forecasting Problem Photo by Sean MacEntee, some rights reserved.

Time series forecasting is an important area of machine learning that is often neglected. It is important because there are so many prediction problems that involve a time component. These problems are neglected because it is this time component that makes time series problems more difficult to handle. In this post, you will discover time series forecasting. What is Time Series Forecasting?