Time series forecasting is one of the challenging problems for humankind. Traditional forecasting methods using mean regression models have severe shortcomings in reflecting real-world fluctuations. While new probabilistic methods rush to rescue, they fight with technical difficulties like quantile crossing or selecting a prior distribution. To meld the different strengths of these fields while avoiding their weaknesses as well as to push the boundary of the state-of-the-art, we introduce ForGAN - one step ahead probabilistic forecasting with generative adversarial networks. ForGAN utilizes the power of the conditional generative adversarial network to learn the data generating distribution and compute probabilistic forecasts from it. We argue how to evaluate ForGAN in opposition to regression methods. To investigate probabilistic forecasting of ForGAN, we create a new dataset and demonstrate our method abilities on it. This dataset will be made publicly available for comparison. Furthermore, we test ForGAN on two publicly available datasets, namely Mackey-Glass dataset and Internet traffic dataset (A5M) where the impressive performance of ForGAN demonstrate its high capability in forecasting future values.
Most research regarding applying GAN on sequential data is concerned with discrete problems, e.g. text generation task. Since the discrete space of words cannot be differentiated in mathematics, modifying a GAN to work with discrete data is a challenging task. Many papers have been published to address this problem and they have reported remarkable results @cite_26 @cite_55 @cite_59 @cite_66 . However, we are interested in the (quasi) continues regime. Therefore, these techniques are not directly applicable here.
@cite_55 @cite_26 @cite_66 @cite_59
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As a new way of training generative models, Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) that uses a discriminative model to guide the training of the generative model has enjoyed considerable success in generating real-valued data. However, it has limitations when the goal is for generating sequences of discrete tokens. A major reason lies in that the discrete outputs from the generative model make it difficult to pass the gradient update from the discriminative model to the generative model. Also, the discriminative model can only assess a complete sequence, while for a partially generated sequence, it is non-trivial to balance its current score and the future one once the entire sequence has been generated. In this paper, we propose a sequence generation framework, called SeqGAN, to solve the problems. Modeling the data generator as a stochastic policy in reinforcement learning (RL), SeqGAN bypasses the generator differentiation problem by directly performing gradient policy update. The RL reward signal comes from the GAN discriminator judged on a complete sequence, and is passed back to the intermediate state-action steps using Monte Carlo search. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real-world tasks demonstrate significant improvements over strong baselines. As a new way of training generative models, Generative Adversarial Net (GAN) that uses a discriminative model to guide the training of the generative model has enjoyed considerable success in generating real-valued data. However, it has limitations when the goal is for generating sequences of discrete tokens. A major reason lies in that the discrete outputs from the generative model make it difficult to pass the gradient update from the discriminative model to the generative model. Also, the discriminative model can only assess a complete sequence, while for a partially generated sequence, it is nontrivial to balance its current score and the future one once the entire sequence has been generated. In this paper, we propose a sequence generation framework, called SeqGAN, to solve the problems. Modeling the data generator as a stochastic policy in reinforcement learning (RL), SeqGAN bypasses the generator differentiation problem by directly performing gradient policy update. The RL reward signal comes from the GAN discriminator judged on a complete sequence, and is passed back to the intermediate state-action steps using Monte Carlo search. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real-world tasks demonstrate significant improvements over strong baselines. We propose in this paper a new approach to train the Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) with a mixture of generators to overcome the mode collapsing problem. The main intuition is to employ multiple generators, instead of using a single one as in the original GAN. The idea is simple, yet proven to be extremely effective at covering diverse data modes, easily overcoming the mode collapsing problem and delivering state-of-the-art results. A minimax formulation was able to establish among a classifier, a discriminator, and a set of generators in a similar spirit with GAN. Generators create samples that are intended to come from the same distribution as the training data, whilst the discriminator determines whether samples are true data or generated by generators, and the classifier specifies which generator a sample comes from. The distinguishing feature is that internal samples are created from multiple generators, and then one of them will be randomly selected as final output similar to the mechanism of a probabilistic mixture model. We term our method Mixture Generative Adversarial Nets (MGAN). We develop theoretical analysis to prove that, at the equilibrium, the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) between the mixture of generators’ distributions and the empirical data distribution is minimal, whilst the JSD among generators’ distributions is maximal, hence effectively avoiding the mode collapsing problem. By utilizing parameter sharing, our proposed model adds minimal computational cost to the standard GAN, and thus can also efficiently scale to large-scale datasets. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic 2D data and natural image databases (CIFAR-10, STL-10 and ImageNet) to demonstrate the superior performance of our MGAN in achieving state-of-the-art Inception scores over latest baselines, generating diverse and appealing recognizable objects at different resolutions, and specializing in capturing different types of objects by the generators. Traditional generative adversarial networks (GAN) and many of its variants are trained by minimizing the KL or JS-divergence loss that measures how close the generated data distribution is from the true data distribution. A recent advance called the WGAN based on Wasserstein distance can improve on the KL and JS-divergence based GANs, and alleviate the gradient vanishing, instability, and mode collapse issues that are common in the GAN training. In this work, we aim at improving on the WGAN by first generalizing its discriminator loss to a margin-based one, which leads to a better discriminator, and in turn a better generator, and then carrying out a progressive training paradigm involving multiple GANs to contribute to the maximum margin ranking loss so that the GAN at later stages will improve upon early stages. We call this method Gang of GANs (GoGAN). We have shown theoretically that the proposed GoGAN can reduce the gap between the true data distribution and the generated data distribution by at least half in an optimally trained WGAN. We have also proposed a new way of measuring GAN quality which is based on image completion tasks. We have evaluated our method on four visual datasets: CelebA, LSUN Bedroom, CIFAR-10, and 50K-SSFF, and have seen both visual and quantitative improvement over baseline WGAN.