An Introductory Study on Time Series Modeling and Forecasting

TL;DR

This paper reviews popular time series forecasting models, including stochastic, neural networks, and SVMs, discussing their features, challenges, and performance on real datasets with comprehensive evaluation metrics.

Contribution

It provides a concise comparison of different time series models, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and practical performance based on experiments on six real datasets.

Findings

Neural network models show superior accuracy in certain datasets.

Model parsimony is crucial for effective forecasting.

Performance varies across models depending on dataset characteristics.

Abstract

Time series modeling and forecasting has fundamental importance to various practical domains. Thus a lot of active research works is going on in this subject during several years. Many important models have been proposed in literature for improving the accuracy and effectiveness of time series forecasting. The aim of this dissertation work is to present a concise description of some popular time series forecasting models used in practice, with their salient features. In this thesis, we have described three important classes of time series models, viz. the stochastic, neural networks and SVM based models, together with their inherent forecasting strengths and weaknesses. We have also discussed about the basic issues related to time series modeling, such as stationarity, parsimony, overfitting, etc. Our discussion about different time series models is supported by giving the experimental forecast results, performed on six real time series datasets. While fitting a model to a dataset, special care is taken to select the most parsimonious one. To evaluate forecast accuracy as well as to compare among different models fitted to a time series, we have used the five performance measures, viz. MSE, MAD, RMSE, MAPE and Theil's U-statistics. For each of the six datasets, we have shown the obtained forecast diagram which graphically depicts the closeness between the original and forecasted observations. To have authenticity as well as clarity in our discussion about time series modeling and forecasting, we have taken the help of various published research works from reputed journals and some standard books.