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Main Authors: Godahewa, Rakshitha, Bergmeir, Christoph, Baz, Zeynep Erkin, Zhu, Chengjun, Song, Zhangdi, García, Salvador, Benavides, Dario
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17332
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author Godahewa, Rakshitha
Bergmeir, Christoph
Baz, Zeynep Erkin
Zhu, Chengjun
Song, Zhangdi
García, Salvador
Benavides, Dario
author_facet Godahewa, Rakshitha
Bergmeir, Christoph
Baz, Zeynep Erkin
Zhu, Chengjun
Song, Zhangdi
García, Salvador
Benavides, Dario
contents Forecasts are typically not produced in a vacuum but in a business context, where forecasts are generated on a regular basis and interact with each other. For decisions, it may be important that forecasts do not change arbitrarily, and are stable in some sense. However, this area has received only limited attention in the forecasting literature. In this paper, we explore two types of forecast stability that we call vertical stability and horizontal stability. The existing works in the literature are only applicable to certain base models and extending these frameworks to be compatible with any base model is not straightforward. Furthermore, these frameworks can only stabilise the forecasts vertically. To fill this gap, we propose a simple linear-interpolation-based approach that is applicable to stabilise the forecasts provided by any base model vertically and horizontally. The approach can produce both accurate and stable forecasts. Using N-BEATS, Pooled Regression and LightGBM as the base models, in our evaluation on four publicly available datasets, the proposed framework is able to achieve significantly higher stability and/or accuracy compared to a set of benchmarks including a state-of-the-art forecast stabilisation method across three error metrics and six stability metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_17332
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Forecast Stability
Godahewa, Rakshitha
Bergmeir, Christoph
Baz, Zeynep Erkin
Zhu, Chengjun
Song, Zhangdi
García, Salvador
Benavides, Dario
Machine Learning
Forecasts are typically not produced in a vacuum but in a business context, where forecasts are generated on a regular basis and interact with each other. For decisions, it may be important that forecasts do not change arbitrarily, and are stable in some sense. However, this area has received only limited attention in the forecasting literature. In this paper, we explore two types of forecast stability that we call vertical stability and horizontal stability. The existing works in the literature are only applicable to certain base models and extending these frameworks to be compatible with any base model is not straightforward. Furthermore, these frameworks can only stabilise the forecasts vertically. To fill this gap, we propose a simple linear-interpolation-based approach that is applicable to stabilise the forecasts provided by any base model vertically and horizontally. The approach can produce both accurate and stable forecasts. Using N-BEATS, Pooled Regression and LightGBM as the base models, in our evaluation on four publicly available datasets, the proposed framework is able to achieve significantly higher stability and/or accuracy compared to a set of benchmarks including a state-of-the-art forecast stabilisation method across three error metrics and six stability metrics.
title On Forecast Stability
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17332