A Scalable and Transferable Time Series Prediction Framework for Demand Forecasting
This addresses demand forecasting and logistics optimization for businesses, offering a scalable and transferable solution that is incremental in improving model size and accuracy.
The paper tackles the problem of limited expressive power in traditional time series forecasting methods by proposing Forchestra, a framework that scales to 0.8 billion parameters and outperforms existing models with significant margins while generalizing well to unseen data in zero-shot evaluations.
Time series forecasting is one of the most essential and ubiquitous tasks in many business problems, including demand forecasting and logistics optimization. Traditional time series forecasting methods, however, have resulted in small models with limited expressive power because they have difficulty in scaling their model size up while maintaining high accuracy. In this paper, we propose Forecasting orchestra (Forchestra), a simple but powerful framework capable of accurately predicting future demand for a diverse range of items. We empirically demonstrate that the model size is scalable to up to 0.8 billion parameters. The proposed method not only outperforms existing forecasting models with a significant margin, but it could generalize well to unseen data points when evaluated in a zero-shot fashion on downstream datasets. Last but not least, we present extensive qualitative and quantitative studies to analyze how the proposed model outperforms baseline models and differs from conventional approaches. The original paper was presented as a full paper at ICDM 2022 and is available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10027662.