2023/07/07 by Sitan Yang, Malcolm Wolff, Yang, Sitan +9 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Forecasting Techniques and Applications #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Stock Market Forecasting Methods #Time Series Analysis and Forecasting
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.03595
openalex publication_date 2023/07/07 · openalex created_date 2023/07/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Encoder-decoder deep neural networks have been increasingly studied for multi-horizon time series forecasting, especially in real-world applications. However, to forecast accurately, these sophisticated models typically rely on a large number of time series examples with substantial history. A rapidly growing topic of interest is forecasting time series which lack sufficient historical data -- often referred to as the ``cold start'' problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel yet simple method to address this problem by leveraging graph neural networks (GNNs) as a data augmentation for enhancing the encoder used by such forecasters. These GNN-based features can capture complex inter-series relationships, and their generation process can be optimized end-to-end with the forecasting task. We show that our architecture can use either data-driven or domain knowledge-defined graphs, scaling to incorporate information from multiple very large graphs with millions of nodes. In our target application of demand forecasting for a large e-commerce retailer, we demonstrate on both a small dataset of 100K products and a large dataset with over 2 million products that our method improves overall performance over competitive baseline models. More importantly, we show that it brings substantially more gains to ``cold start'' products such as those newly launched or recently out-of-stock.