An Analysis of Linear Time Series Forecasting Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Toner, William, Darlow, Luke
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Toner, William
Darlow, Luke
author_facet Toner, William
Darlow, Luke
contents Despite their simplicity, linear models perform well at time series forecasting, even when pitted against deeper and more expensive models. A number of variations to the linear model have been proposed, often including some form of feature normalisation that improves model generalisation. In this paper we analyse the sets of functions expressible using these linear model architectures. In so doing we show that several popular variants of linear models for time series forecasting are equivalent and functionally indistinguishable from standard, unconstrained linear regression. We characterise the model classes for each linear variant. We demonstrate that each model can be reinterpreted as unconstrained linear regression over a suitably augmented feature set, and therefore admit closed-form solutions when using a mean-squared loss function. We provide experimental evidence that the models under inspection learn nearly identical solutions, and finally demonstrate that the simpler closed form solutions are superior forecasters across 72% of test settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_14587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Analysis of Linear Time Series Forecasting Models
Toner, William
Darlow, Luke
Machine Learning
Despite their simplicity, linear models perform well at time series forecasting, even when pitted against deeper and more expensive models. A number of variations to the linear model have been proposed, often including some form of feature normalisation that improves model generalisation. In this paper we analyse the sets of functions expressible using these linear model architectures. In so doing we show that several popular variants of linear models for time series forecasting are equivalent and functionally indistinguishable from standard, unconstrained linear regression. We characterise the model classes for each linear variant. We demonstrate that each model can be reinterpreted as unconstrained linear regression over a suitably augmented feature set, and therefore admit closed-form solutions when using a mean-squared loss function. We provide experimental evidence that the models under inspection learn nearly identical solutions, and finally demonstrate that the simpler closed form solutions are superior forecasters across 72% of test settings.
title An Analysis of Linear Time Series Forecasting Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14587