pTSE: A Multi-model Ensemble Method for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

pTSE: A Multi-model Ensemble Method for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Yunyi Zhou, Zhixuan Chu, Yijia Ruan, Ge Jin, Yuchen Huang, Sheng Li

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4684-4692. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/521

Various probabilistic time series forecasting models have sprung up and shown remarkably good performance. However, the choice of model highly relies on the characteristics of the input time series and the fixed distribution that model is based on. Due to the fact that the probability distributions cannot be averaged over different models straightforwardly, the current time series model ensemble methods cannot be directly applied to improve the robustness and accuracy of forecasting. To address this issue, we propose pTSE, a multi-model distribution ensemble method for probabilistic forecasting based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM). pTSE only takes off-the-shelf outputs from member models without requiring further information about each model. Besides, we provide a complete theoretical analysis of pTSE to prove that the empirical distribution of time series subject to an HMM will converge to the stationary distribution almost surely. Experiments on benchmarks show the superiority of pTSE over all member models and competitive ensemble methods.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Probabilistic machine learning
Machine Learning: ML: Time series and data streams