F4: large-scale automated forecasting using fractals

Deepayan Chakrabarti, Christos Faloutsos

Abstract: Forecasting has attracted a lot of research interest, with very successful methods for periodic time series. Here, we propose a fast, automated method to do non-linear forecasting, for both periodic as well as chaotic time series. We use the technique of delay coordinate embedding, which needs several parameters; our contribution is the automated way of setting these parameters, using the concept of `intrinsic dimensionality'. Our operational system has fast and scalable algorithms for preprocessing and, using R-trees, also has fast methods for forecasting. The result of this work is a black-box which, given a time series as input, finds the best parameter settings, and generates a prediction system. Tests on real and synthetic data show that our system achieves low error, while it can handle arbitrarily large datasets.