Performative Time-Series Forecasting

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Zhiyuan, Liu, Haoxin, Rodriguez, Alexander, Prakash, B. Aditya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909633512210432
author Zhao, Zhiyuan
Liu, Haoxin
Rodriguez, Alexander
Prakash, B. Aditya
author_facet Zhao, Zhiyuan
Liu, Haoxin
Rodriguez, Alexander
Prakash, B. Aditya
contents Time-series forecasting is a critical challenge in various domains and has witnessed substantial progress in recent years. Many real-life scenarios, such as public health, economics, and social applications, involve feedback loops where predictions can influence the predicted outcome, subsequently altering the target variable's distribution. This phenomenon, known as performativity, introduces the potential for 'self-negating' or 'self-fulfilling' predictions. Despite extensive studies in classification problems across domains, performativity remains largely unexplored in the context of time-series forecasting from a machine-learning perspective. In this paper, we formalize performative time-series forecasting (PeTS), addressing the challenge of accurate predictions when performativity-induced distribution shifts are possible. We propose a novel approach, Feature Performative-Shifting (FPS), which leverages the concept of delayed response to anticipate distribution shifts and subsequently predicts targets accordingly. We provide theoretical insights suggesting that FPS can potentially lead to reduced generalization error. We conduct comprehensive experiments using multiple time-series models on COVID-19 and traffic forecasting tasks. The results demonstrate that FPS consistently outperforms conventional time-series forecasting methods, highlighting its efficacy in handling performativity-induced challenges.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_06077
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Performative Time-Series Forecasting
Zhao, Zhiyuan
Liu, Haoxin
Rodriguez, Alexander
Prakash, B. Aditya
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Time-series forecasting is a critical challenge in various domains and has witnessed substantial progress in recent years. Many real-life scenarios, such as public health, economics, and social applications, involve feedback loops where predictions can influence the predicted outcome, subsequently altering the target variable's distribution. This phenomenon, known as performativity, introduces the potential for 'self-negating' or 'self-fulfilling' predictions. Despite extensive studies in classification problems across domains, performativity remains largely unexplored in the context of time-series forecasting from a machine-learning perspective. In this paper, we formalize performative time-series forecasting (PeTS), addressing the challenge of accurate predictions when performativity-induced distribution shifts are possible. We propose a novel approach, Feature Performative-Shifting (FPS), which leverages the concept of delayed response to anticipate distribution shifts and subsequently predicts targets accordingly. We provide theoretical insights suggesting that FPS can potentially lead to reduced generalization error. We conduct comprehensive experiments using multiple time-series models on COVID-19 and traffic forecasting tasks. The results demonstrate that FPS consistently outperforms conventional time-series forecasting methods, highlighting its efficacy in handling performativity-induced challenges.
title Performative Time-Series Forecasting
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06077