We introduce a dynamical spatio-temporal model formalized as a recurrent neural network for forecasting time series of spatial processes, i.e. series of observations sharing temporal and spatial dependencies. The model learns these dependencies through a structured latent dynamical component, while a decoder predicts the observations from the latent representations. We consider several variants of this model, corresponding to different prior hypothesis about the spatial relations between the series. The model is evaluated and compared to state-of-the-art baselines, on a variety of forecasting problems representative of different application areas: epidemiology, geo-spatial statistics and car-traffic prediction. Besides these evaluations, we also describe experiments showing the ability of this approach to extract relevant spatial relations.
Dynamical state space models, such as recurrent neural networks, have been used for time series forecasting in different contexts since the early nineties @cite_24 . Recently, these models have witnessed important successes in different areas of sequence modeling problems, leading to breakthrough in domains like speech @cite_28 , language generation @cite_23 , translation @cite_6 and many others. A model closely related to our work is the dynamic factor graph model @cite_3 designed for multiple series modeling. Like ours, it is a generative model with a latent component that captures the temporal dynamics and a decoder for predicting the series. However, spatial dependencies are not considered in this model, and the learning and inference algorithms are different.
@cite_28 @cite_3 @cite_6 @cite_24 @cite_23
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We introduce a dynamical spatio-temporal model formalized as a recurrent neural network for forecasting time series of spatial processes, i.e. series of observations sharing temporal and spatial dependencies. The model learns these dependencies through a structured latent dynamical component, while a decoder predicts the observations from the latent representations. We consider several variants of this model, corresponding to different prior hypothesis about the spatial relations between the series. The model is evaluated and compared to state-of-the-art baselines, on a variety of forecasting problems representative of different application areas: epidemiology, geo-spatial statistics and car-traffic prediction. Besides these evaluations, we also describe experiments showing the ability of this approach to extract relevant spatial relations. textabstractForecasting financial time series using past observations has been a significant topic of interest. While temporal relationships in the data exist, they are difficult to analyze and predict accurately due to the non-linear trends and noise present in the series. We propose to learn these dependencies by a convolutional neural network. In particular the focus is on multivariate time series forecasting. Effectively, we use multiple financial time series as input in the neural network, thus conditioning the forecast of a time series x(t) on both its own history as well as that of a second (or third) time series y(t). Training a model on multiple stock series allows the network to exploit the correlation structure between these series so that the network can learn the market dynamics in shorter sequences of data. We show that long-term temporal dependencies in and between financial time series can be learned by means of a deep convolutional neural network based on the WaveNet model [2]. The network makes use of dilated convolutions applied to multiple time series so that the receptive field of the network is wide enough to learn both short and long-term dependencies. The architecture includes batch normalization and uses a 1 × k convolution with parametrized skip connections from the input time series as well as the time series we condition on, in this way learning long-term interdependencies in an efficient manner [1]. This improves the forecast, while at the same time limiting the requirement for a long historical price series and reducing the noise. Knowing the strong performance of CNNs on classification problems we show that they can be applied successfully to forecasting financial time series, without the need of large samples of data. We compare the performance of the WaveNet model to a state-of-the-art fully convolutional network (FCN), and an autoregressive model popular in econometrics and show that our model is much better able to learn important dependencies in between financial time series resulting in a more robust and accurate forecast. We have already shown that extracting long-term dependencies from sequential data is difficult, both for determimstic dynamical systems such as recurrent networks, and probabilistic models such as hidden Markov models (HMMs) or input output hidden Markov models (IOHMMs). In practice, to avoid this problem, researchers have used domain specific a-priori knowledge to give meaning to the hidden or state variables representing past context. In this paper, we propose to use a more general type of a-priori knowledge, namely that the temporal dependencies are structured hierarchically. This implies that long-term dependencies are represented by variables with a long time scale. This principle is applied to a recurrent network which includes delays and multiple time scales. Experiments confirm the advantages of such structures. A similar approach is proposed for HMMs and IOHMMs. How can we efficiently propagate uncertainty in a latent state representation with recurrent neural networks? This paper introduces stochastic recurrent neural networks which glue a deterministic recurrent neural network and a state space model together to form a stochastic and sequential neural generative model. The clear separation of deterministic and stochastic layers allows a structured variational inference network to track the factorization of the model’s posterior distribution. By retaining both the nonlinear recursive structure of a recurrent neural network and averaging over the uncertainty in a latent path, like a state space model, we improve the state of the art results on the Blizzard and TIMIT speech modeling data sets by a large margin, while achieving comparable performances to competing methods on polyphonic music modeling.