Coherent Probabilistic Forecasts for Hierarchical Time Series

Souhaib Ben Taieb, James Taylor () and Rob Hyndman

No 3/17, Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics

Abstract: Many applications require forecasts for a hierarchy comprising a set of time series along with aggregates of subsets of these series. Although forecasts can be produced independently for each series in the hierarchy, typically this does not lead to coherent forecasts -- the property that forecasts add up appropriately across the hierarchy. State-of-the-art hierarchical forecasting methods usually reconcile the independently generated forecasts to satisfy the aggregation constraints. A fundamental limitation of prior research is that it has considered only the problem of forecasting the mean of each time series. We consider the situation where probabilistic forecasts are needed for each series in the hierarchy. We define forecast coherency in this setting, and propose an algorithm to compute predictive distributions for each series in the hierarchy. Our algorithm has the advantage of synthesizing information from different levels in the hierarchy through a sparse forecast combination and a probabilistic hierarchical aggregation. We evaluate the accuracy of our forecasting algorithm on both simulated data and large-scale electricity smart meter data. The results show consistent performance gains compared to state-of-the art methods.

Keywords: forecast combination; probabilistic forecast; copula; machine learning. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C53 Q47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm, nep-ets and nep-for
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://business.monash.edu/econometrics-and-busine ... ions/ebs/wp03-17.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:msh:ebswps:2017-3

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://business.mona ... -business-statistics

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics PO Box 11E, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Professor Xibin Zhang ().