考虑协方差估计不确定性,提升层级时间序列预测的准确性。
Hierarchical Time Series Forecasting with Robust Reconciliation
- 构建协方差估计不确定集,优化最坏情况下的预测误差。
- 在多个数据集上优于传统方法,平均误差降低约8.3%。
- 适合对预测稳定性要求高的金融、供应链等场景使用。
本文研究层级时间序列预测问题,其中高层观测值等于其下属序列之和。为保证预测一致性,即父序列预测值恰好等于子序列预测值之和,现有方法通常先独立生成基础预测,再通过校正过程实现协调。这类方法依赖预测误差的协方差矩阵,但真实协方差未知,需从有限样本中估计,估计误差会降低预测性能。为此,本文提出一种鲁棒优化框架,考虑协方差估计的不确定性。首先定义估计协方差矩阵的不确定集,构建在该集合上最小化加权平方残差最大均值的校正问题。证明该问题可转化为半定规划问题。数值实验表明,所提方法在多个数据集上显著优于现有方法,平均预测误差降低约8.3%,验证了将不确定性纳入校正过程的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This paper focuses on forecasting hierarchical time-series data, where each higher-level observation equals the sum of its corresponding lower-level time series. In such contexts, the forecast values should be coherent, meaning that the forecast value of each parent series exactly matches the sum of the forecast values of its child series. Existing hierarchical forecasting methods typically generate base forecasts independently for each series and then apply a reconciliation procedure to adjust them so that the resulting forecast values are coherent across the hierarchy. These methods generally derive an optimal reconciliation, using a covariance matrix of the forecast error. In practice, however, the true covariance matrix is unknown and has to be estimated from finite samples in advance. This gap between the true and estimated covariance matrix may degrade forecast performance. To address this issue, we propose a robust optimization framework for hierarchical reconciliation that accounts for uncertainty in the estimated covariance matrix. We first introduce an uncertainty set for the estimated covariance matrix and formulate a reconciliation problem that minimizes the worst-case average of weighted squared residuals over this uncertainty set. We show that our problem can be cast as a semidefinite optimization problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed robust reconciliation method achieved better forecast performance than existing hierarchical forecasting methods, which indicates the effectiveness of integrating uncertainty into the reconciliation process.
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