High concentration episodes for NO$_2$ are increasingly dealt with by authorities through traffic restrictions which are activated when air quality deteriorates beyond certain thresholds. Foreseeing the probability that pollutant concentrations reach those thresholds becomes thus a necessity. Probabilistic forecasting is a family of techniques that allow for the prediction of the expected distribution function instead of a single value. In the case of NO$_2$, it allows for the calculation of future chances of exceeding thresholds and to detect pollution peaks. We thoroughly compared 10 state of the art probabilistic predictive models, using them to predict the distribution of NO$_2$ concentrations in a urban location for a set of forecasting horizons (up to 60 hours). Quantile gradient boosted trees shows the best performance, yielding the best results for both the expected value and the forecast full distribution. Furthermore, we show how this approach can be used to detect pollution peaks.
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Open Climate Fix（开放气候修复）；National Center for Atmospheric Research（美国国家大气研究中心）
Advancing probabilistic solar forecasting methods is essential to supporting the integration of solar energy into the electricity grid. In this work, we develop a variety of state-of-the-art probabilistic models for forecasting solar irradiance. We investigate the use of post-hoc calibration techniques for ensuring well-calibrated probabilistic predictions. We train and evaluate the models using public data from seven stations in the SURFRAD network, and demonstrate that the best model, NGBoost, achieves higher performance at an intra-hourly resolution than the best benchmark solar irradiance …
GEIRI North America（北美电力科学研究院）；State Grid Jiangsu Electric Power Company Ltd.（国网江苏省电力有限公司）
Short-term load forecasting is a critical element of power systems energy management systems. In recent years, probabilistic load forecasting (PLF) has gained increased attention for its ability to provide uncertainty information that helps to improve the reliability and economics of system operation performances. This paper proposes a two-stage probabilistic load forecasting framework by integrating point forecast as a key probabilistic forecasting feature into PLF. In the first stage, all related features are utilized to train a point forecast model and also obtain the feature importance. In…
Shandong University（山东大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Short-term probabilistic wind power forecasting can provide critical quantified uncertainty information of wind generation for power system operation and control. As the complicated characteristics of wind power prediction error, it would be difficult to develop a universal forecasting model dominating over other alternative models. Therefore, a novel multi-model combination (MMC) approach for short-term probabilistic wind generation forecasting is proposed in this paper to exploit the advantages of different forecasting models. The proposed approach can combine different forecasting models th…
AI Institute（人工智能研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Probabilistic time series forecasting involves estimating the distribution of future based on its history, which is essential for risk management in downstream decision-making. We propose a deep state space model for probabilistic time series forecasting whereby the non-linear emission model and transition model are parameterized by networks and the dependency is modeled by recurrent neural nets. We take the automatic relevance determination (ARD) view and devise a network to exploit the exogenous variables in addition to time series. In particular, our ARD network can incorporate the uncertai…
Probabilistic, hierarchically coherent forecasting is a key problem in many practical forecasting applications -- the goal is to obtain coherent probabilistic predictions for a large number of time series arranged in a pre-specified tree hierarchy. In this paper, we present an end-to-end deep probabilistic model for hierarchical forecasting that is motivated by a classical top-down strategy. It jointly learns the distribution of the root time series, and the (dirichlet) proportions according to which each parent time-series is split among its children at any point in time. The resulting foreca…
ProGen: Revisiting Probabilistic Spatial-Temporal Time Series Forecasting from a Continuous Generative Perspective Using Stochastic Differential Equations
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
Probabilistic forecasting, i.e. estimating the probability distribution of a time series' future given its past, is a key enabler for optimizing business processes. In retail businesses, for example, forecasting demand is crucial for having the right inventory available at the right time at the right place. In this paper we propose DeepAR, a methodology for producing accurate probabilistic forecasts, based on training an auto regressive recurrent network model on a large number of related time series. We demonstrate how by applying deep learning techniques to forecasting, one can overcome many…
University of Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））
Time series forecasting is one of the challenging problems for humankind. Traditional forecasting methods using mean regression models have severe shortcomings in reflecting real-world fluctuations. While new probabilistic methods rush to rescue, they fight with technical difficulties like quantile crossing or selecting a prior distribution. To meld the different strengths of these fields while avoiding their weaknesses as well as to push the boundary of the state-of-the-art, we introduce ForGAN - one step ahead probabilistic forecasting with generative adversarial networks. ForGAN utilizes th…
The problem of probabilistic forecasting and online simulation of real-time electricity market with stochastic generation and demand is considered. By exploiting the parametric structure of the direct current optimal power flow, a new technique based on online dictionary learning (ODL) is proposed. The ODL approach incorporates real-time measurements and historical traces to produce forecasts of joint and marginal probability distributions of future locational marginal prices, power flows, and dispatch levels, conditional on the system state at the time of forecasting. Compared with standard M…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）
Energy price forecasting is a relevant yet hard task in the field of multi-step time series forecasting. In this paper we compare a well-known and established method, ARMA with exogenous variables with a relatively new technique Gradient Boosting Regression. The method was tested on data from Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014 with a year long rolling window forecast. The results from the experiment reveal that a multi-model approach is significantly better performing in terms of error metrics. Gradient Boosting can deal with seasonality and auto-correlation out-of-the box and achieve …
Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, Switzerland（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机科学系）
We develop an effective generation of adversarial attacks on neural models that output a sequence of probability distributions rather than a sequence of single values. This setting includes the recently proposed deep probabilistic autoregressive forecasting models that estimate the probability distribution of a time series given its past and achieve state-of-the-art results in a diverse set of application domains. The key technical challenge we address is effectively differentiating through the Monte-Carlo estimation of statistics of the joint distribution of the output sequence. Additionally,…
We introduce a new category of multivariate conditional generative models and demonstrate its performance and versatility in probabilistic time series forecasting and simulation. Specifically, the output of quantile regression networks is expanded from a set of fixed quantiles to the whole Quantile Function by a univariate mapping from a latent uniform distribution to the target distribution. Then the multivariate case is solved by learning such quantile functions for each dimension's marginal distribution, followed by estimating a conditional Copula to associate these latent uniform random va…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；Hellenic Air Force（希腊空军）
Probabilistic forecasting is receiving growing attention nowadays in a variety of applied fields, including hydrology. Several machine learning concepts and methods are notably relevant towards addressing the major challenges of formalizing and optimizing probabilistic forecasting implementations, as well as the equally important challenge of identifying the most useful ones among these implementations. Nonetheless, practically-oriented reviews focusing on such concepts and methods, and on how these can be effectively exploited in the above-outlined essential endeavour, are currently missing f…
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 o…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；AWS AI Labs, Amazon Research（亚马逊研究院AWS人工智能实验室）
Probabilistic time series forecasting has played critical role in decision-making processes due to its capability to quantify uncertainties. Deep forecasting models, however, could be prone to input perturbations, and the notion of such perturbations, together with that of robustness, has not even been completely established in the regime of probabilistic forecasting. In this work, we propose a framework for robust probabilistic time series forecasting. First, we generalize the concept of adversarial input perturbations, based on which we formulate the concept of robustness in terms of bounded…
Point forecasting of univariate time series is a challenging problem with extensive work having been conducted. However, nonparametric probabilistic forecasting of time series, such as in the form of quantiles or prediction intervals is an even more challenging problem. In an effort to expand the possible forecasting paradigms we devise and explore an extrapolation-based approach that has not been applied before for probabilistic forecasting. We present a novel quantile Fourier neural network is for nonparametric probabilistic forecasting of univariate time series. Multi-step predictions are p…
Parametric quantile regressions are a useful tool for creating probabilistic energy forecasts. Nonetheless, since classical quantile regressions are trained using a non-differentiable cost function, their creation using complex data mining techniques (e.g., artificial neural networks) may be complicated. This article presents a method that uses a new nearest neighbors quantile filter to obtain quantile regressions independently of the utilized data mining technique and without the non-differentiable cost function. Thereafter, a validation of the presented method using the dataset of the Global…
Toronto Metropolitan University（多伦多都会大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Despite the high performance of neural network-based time series forecasting methods, the inherent challenge in explaining their predictions has limited their applicability in certain application areas. Due to the difficulty in identifying causal relationships between the input and output of such black-box methods, they rarely have been adopted in domains such as legal and medical fields in which the reliability and interpretability of the results can be essential. In this paper, we propose \model, a novel deep learning-based probabilistic time series forecasting architecture that is intrinsic…
Bigo Inc.（Bigo公司）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；IBM China CIC（IBM中国创新中心）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
We present a probabilistic forecasting framework based on convolutional neural network for multiple related time series forecasting. The framework can be applied to estimate probability density under both parametric and non-parametric settings. More specifically, stacked residual blocks based on dilated causal convolutional nets are constructed to capture the temporal dependencies of the series. Combined with representation learning, our approach is able to learn complex patterns such as seasonality, holiday effects within and across series, and to leverage those patterns for more accurate for…
Probabilistic Forecasting with Generative Networks via Scoring Rule Minimization
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts（欧洲中期天气预报中心）
Weather-Informed Probabilistic Forecasting and Scenario Generation in Power Systems
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（工业与系统工程系，佐治亚理工学院）；AI Institute for Advances in Optimization（优化前沿人工智能研究所）
We discuss an approach to probabilistic forecasting based on two chained machine-learning steps: a dimensional reduction step that learns a reduction map of predictor information to a low-dimensional space in a manner designed to preserve information about forecast quantities; and a density estimation step that uses the probabilistic machine learning technique of normalizing flows to compute the joint probability density of reduced predictors and forecast quantities. This joint density is then renormalized to produce the conditional forecast distribution. In this method, probabilistic calibrat…
Here, we propose a general method for probabilistic time series forecasting. We combine an autoregressive recurrent neural network to model temporal dynamics with Implicit Quantile Networks to learn a large class of distributions over a time-series target. When compared to other probabilistic neural forecasting models on real- and simulated data, our approach is favorable in terms of point-wise prediction accuracy as well as on estimating the underlying temporal distribution.
Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria)（奥地利科学技术研究所（IST Austria））
We introduce a spatio-temporal convolutional neural network model for trajectory forecasting from visual sources. Applied in an auto-regressive way it provides an explicit probability distribution over continuations of a given initial trajectory segment. We discuss it in relation to (more complicated) existing work and report on experiments on two standard datasets for trajectory forecasting: MNISTseq and Stanford Drones, achieving results on-par with or better than previous methods.
Adaptive Multi-task Learning for Probabilistic Load Forecasting
BCAM-Basque Center for Applied Mathematics（BCAM-巴斯克应用数学中心）；Zenit Solar Tech；Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)（麻省理工学院（MIT））；IKERBASQUE-Basque Foundation for Science（IKERBASQUE-巴斯克科学基金会）
Probabilistic forecasting consists in predicting a distribution of possible future outcomes. In this paper, we address this problem for non-stationary time series, which is very challenging yet crucially important. We introduce the STRIPE model for representing structured diversity based on shape and time features, ensuring both probable predictions while being sharp and accurate. STRIPE is agnostic to the forecasting model, and we equip it with a diversification mechanism relying on determinantal point processes (DPP). We introduce two DPP kernels for modeling diverse trajectories in terms of…
Multivariate time series prediction has attracted a lot of attention because of its wide applications such as intelligence transportation, AIOps. Generative models have achieved impressive results in time series modeling because they can model data distribution and take noise into consideration. However, many existing works can not be widely used because of the constraints of functional form of generative models or the sensitivity to hyperparameters. In this paper, we propose ScoreGrad, a multivariate probabilistic time series forecasting framework based on continuous energy-based generative m…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Shenyang Blower Works Group Corporation（沈阳鼓风机集团股份有限公司）
The demand of probabilistic time series forecasting has been recently raised in various dynamic system scenarios, for example, system identification and prognostic and health management of machines. To this end, we combine the advances in both deep generative models and state space model (SSM) to come up with a novel, data-driven deep probabilistic sequence model. Specifically, we follow the popular encoder-decoder generative structure to build the recurrent neural networks (RNN) assisted variational sequence model on an augmented recurrent input space, which could induce rich stochastic seque…
Probabilistic forecasting of complex phenomena is paramount to various scientific disciplines and applications. Despite the generality and importance of the problem, general mathematical techniques that allow for stable long-term forecasts with calibrated uncertainty measures are lacking. For most time series models, the difficulty of obtaining accurate probabilistic future time step predictions increases with the prediction horizon. In this paper, we introduce a surprisingly simple approach that characterizes time-varying distributions and enables reasonably accurate predictions thousands of …
University of Patras（帕特雷大学）；Roma Tre University（罗马第三大学）；National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）
Machine and statistical learning algorithms can be reliably automated and applied at scale. Therefore, they can constitute a considerable asset for designing practical forecasting systems, such as those related to urban water demand. Quantile regression algorithms are statistical and machine learning algorithms that can provide probabilistic forecasts in a straightforward way, and have not been applied so far for urban water demand forecasting. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by automating and extensively comparing several quantile-regression-based practical systems for probabilistic one…
SPECTRA: State-Space Exogenous Context and Temporal-Frequency Resolution Architecture for Probabilistic Energy Forecasting
Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海先进研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Physical Science and Technology, Shanghaitech University（上海科技大学物理科学与技术学院）；State Power Investment Corporation Limited（国家电力投资集团有限公司）；China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）
Probabilistic forecasts are essential for various downstream applications such as business development, traffic planning, and electrical grid balancing. Many of these probabilistic forecasts are performed on time series data that contain calendar-driven periodicities. However, existing probabilistic forecasting methods do not explicitly take these periodicities into account. Therefore, in the present paper, we introduce a deep learning-based method that considers these calendar-driven periodicities explicitly. The present paper, thus, has a twofold contribution: First, we apply statistical met…
Load forecasts have become an integral part of energy security. Due to the various influencing factors that can be considered in such a forecast, there is also a wide range of models that attempt to integrate these parameters into a system in various ways. Due to the growing importance of probabilistic load forecast models, different approaches are presented in this analysis. The focus is on different models from the short-term sector. After that, another model from the long-term sector is presented. Then, the presented models are put in relation to each other and examined with reference to ad…
Time-series is ubiquitous across applications, such as transportation, finance and healthcare. Time-series is often influenced by external factors, especially in the form of asynchronous events, making forecasting difficult. However, existing models are mainly designated for either synchronous time-series or asynchronous event sequence, and can hardly provide a synthetic way to capture the relation between them. We propose Variational Synergetic Multi-Horizon Network (VSMHN), a novel deep conditional generative model. To learn complex correlations across heterogeneous sequences, a tailored enc…
Middle-term horizon (months to a year) power consumption prediction is a main challenge in the energy sector, in particular when probabilistic forecasting is considered. We propose a new modelling approach that incorporates trend, seasonality and weather conditions, as explicative variables in a shallow Neural Network with an autoregressive feature. We obtain excellent results for density forecast on the one-year test set applying it to the daily power consumption in New England U.S.A.. The quality of the achieved power consumption probabilistic forecasting has been verified, on the one hand, …
This note proves a weak type of the sharpness principle as conjectured by Gneiting, Balabdaoui, and Raftery in 2007 in connection with probabilistic forecasting subject to calibration constraints. A strong version of such a principle still awaits a proper formulation.
We study the estimation of the probability distribution of individual patient waiting times in an emergency department (ED). Our feature-rich modelling allows for dynamic updating and refinement of waiting time estimates as patient- and ED-specific information (e.g., patient condition, ED congestion levels) is revealed during the waiting process. Aspects relating to communicating forecast uncertainty to patients, and implementing this methodology in practice, are also discussed.
The M5 competition uncertainty track aims for probabilistic forecasting of sales of thousands of Walmart retail goods. We show that the M5 competition data faces strong overdispersion and sporadic demand, especially zero demand. We discuss resulting modeling issues concerning adequate probabilistic forecasting of such count data processes. Unfortunately, the majority of popular prediction methods used in the M5 competition (e.g. lightgbm and xgboost GBMs) fails to address the data characteristics due to the considered objective functions. The distributional forecasting provides a suitable mode…
Deep probabilistic forecasting is gaining attention in numerous applications ranging from weather prognosis, through electricity consumption estimation, to autonomous vehicle trajectory prediction. However, existing approaches focus on improvements on the most common scenarios without addressing the performance on rare and difficult cases. In this work, we identify a long tail behavior in the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning methods on probabilistic forecasting. We present two moment-based tailedness measurement concepts to improve performance on the difficult tail examples: Paret…
