Statistical Feature Construction for Forecasting Accuracy Increase and Its Applications in Neural Network Based Analysis

This paper presents a feature construction approach called Statistical Feature Construction (SFC) for time series prediction. Creation of new features is based on statistical characteristics of analyzed data series. First, the initial data are transformed into an array of short pseudo-stationary windows. For each window, a statistical model is created and characteristics of these models are later used as additional features for a single window or as time-dependent features for the entire time series. To demonstrate the effect of SFC, five plasma physics and six oceanographic time series were analyzed. For each window, unknown distribution parameters were estimated with the method of moving separation of finite normal mixtures. First four statistical moments of these mixtures for initial data and increments were used as additional data features. Multi-layer recurrent neural networks were trained to create short- and medium-term forecasts with a single window as input data; additional features were used to initialize the hidden state of recurrent layers. A hyperparameter grid-search was performed to compare fully-optimized neural networks for original and enriched data. A significant decrease in RMSE metric was observed with a median of 11.4%. There was no increase in RMSE metric in any of the analyzed time series. The experimental results have shown that SFC can be a valuable method for forecasting accuracy improvement.