Time Series Prediction by Multi-task GPR with Spatiotemporal Information Transformation

Making an accurate prediction of an unknown system only from a short-term time series is difficult due to the lack of sufficient information, especially in a multi-step-ahead manner. However, a high-dimensional short-term time series contains rich dynamical information, and also becomes increasingly available in many fields. In this work, by exploiting spatiotemporal information (STI) transformation scheme that transforms such high-dimensional/spatial information to temporal information, we developed a new method called MT-GPRMachine to achieve accurate prediction from a short-term time series. Specifically, we first construct a specific multi-task GPR which is multiple linked STI mappings to transform high dimensional/spatial information into temporal/dynamical information of any given target variable, and then makes multi step-ahead prediction of the target variable by solving those STI mappings. The multi-step-ahead prediction results on various synthetic and real-world datasets clearly validated that MT-GPRMachine outperformed other existing approaches.

Spatiotemporal convolutional network for time-series prediction and causal inference

Making predictions in a robust way is not easy for nonlinear systems. In this work, a neural network computing framework, i.e., a spatiotemporal convolutional network (STCN), was developed to efficiently and accurately render a multistep-ahead prediction of a time series by employing a spatial-temporal information (STI) transformation. The STCN combines the advantages of both the temporal convolutional network (TCN) and the STI equation, which maps the high-dimensional/spatial data to the future temporal values of a target variable, thus naturally providing the prediction of the target variable. From the observed variables, the STCN also infers the causal factors of the target variable in the sense of Granger causality, which are in turn selected as effective spatial information to improve the prediction robustness. The STCN was successfully applied to both benchmark systems and real-world datasets, all of which show superior and robust performance in multistep-ahead prediction, even when the data were perturbed by noise. From both theoretical and computational viewpoints, the STCN has great potential in practical applications in artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning fields as a model-free method based only on the observed data, and also opens a new way to explore the observed high-dimensional data in a dynamical manner for machine learning.