MOFC Demand Forecasting with Time Series Analysis

Goals

• Compare the accuracy of various time series forecasting algorithms such as Prophet, DeepAR, VAR, DeepVAR, and LightGBM
• (Optional) Use tsfresh for automated feature engineering of time series data.

Requirements

• The dataset can be downloaded from this Kaggle competition.
• In addition to the Anaconda libraries, you need to install altair, vega_datasets, category_encoders, mxnet, gluonts, kats, lightgbm, hyperopt and pandarallel.
  • kats requires Python 3.7 or higher.

Competition, Datasets and Evaluation

• The M5 Competition aims to forecast daily sales for the next 28 days based on sales over the last 1,941 days for IDs of 30,490 items per Walmart store.
• Data includes (i) time series of daily sales quantity by ID, (ii) sales prices, and (iii) holiday and event information.
• Evaluation is done through Weighted Root Mean Squared Scaled Error. A detailed explanation is given in the M5 Participants Guide and the implementation is at this link.
• For hyperparameter tuning, 0.1% of IDs were randomly selected and used, and 1% were used to measure test set performance.

Algorithms

Kats: Prophet

• Prophet can incorporate forward-looking related time series into the model, so additional features were created with holiday and event information.
• Since a Prophet model has to fit for each ID, I had to use the apply function of the pandas dataframe and instead used pandarallel to maximize the parallelization performance.
• Prophet hyperparameters were tuned through 3-fold CV using the Bayesian Optimization module built into the Kats library. In this case, Tweedie was applied as the loss function. Below is the hyperparameter tuning result.

• In the figures below, the actual sales (black dots), the point predictions and confidence intervals (blue lines and bands), and the red dotted lines representing the test period are shown.

Kats: VAR

• Since VAR is a multivariate time series model, the more IDs it fits simultaneously, the better the performance, and the memory requirement increases exponentially.

GluonTS: DeepAR

• DeepAR can incorporate metadata and forward-looking related time series into the model, so additional features were created with sales prices, holiday and event information. Dynamic categorical variables were quantified through Feature Hashing.
• As a hyperparameter, it is very important to set the probability distribution of the output, and here it is set as the Negative Binomial distribution.

GluonTS: DeepVAR

• In the case of DeepVAR, a multivariate model, what can be set as the probability distribution of the output is limited (i.e. Multivariate Gaussian distribution), which leads to a decrease in performance.

LightGBM

• I used tsfresh to convert time series into structured data features, which consumes a lot of computational resources even with minimal settings.
• A LightGBM Tweedie regression model was fitted. Hyperparameters were tuned via 3-fold CV using the Bayesian Optimization function of the hyperopt library. The following is the hyperparameter tuning result.

• The sales forecast for day D+1 was used recursively to predict the sales volume for day D+2 through feature engineering, and through this iterative process, 28-day test set performance was measured.

Algorithms Performance Summary

As a result, DeepAR was finally selected and submitted its predictions to Kaggle, achieving a WRMSSE value of 0.8112 based on the private leaderboard.

References

• Taylor SJ, Letham B. 2017. Forecasting at scale. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3190v2
• Prophet: Forecasting at Scale
• Stock, James, H., Mark W. Watson. 2001. Vector Autoregressions. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15 (4): 101-115.
• David Salinas, Valentin Flunkert, Jan Gasthaus, Tim Januschowski. 2020. DeepAR: Probabilistic forecasting with autoregressive recurrent networks, International Journal of Forecasting, 36 (3): 1181-1191.
• David Salinas, Michael Bohlke-Schneider, Laurent Callot, Roberto Medico, Jan Gasthaus. 2019. High-dimensional multivariate forecasting with low-rank Gaussian Copula Processes. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 6827–6837.
• Kats - One Stop Shop for Time Series Analysis in Python
• GluonTS - Probabilistic Time Series Modeling