Resampling strategies for imbalanced time series forecasting

Abstract

Time series forecasting is a challenging task, where the non-stationary characteristics of data portray a hard setting for predictive tasks. A common issue is the imbalanced distribution of the target variable, where some values are very important to the user but severely under-represented. Standard prediction tools focus on the average behaviour of the data. However, the objective is the opposite in many forecasting tasks involving time series: predicting rare values. A common solution to forecasting tasks with imbalanced data is the use of resampling strategies, which operate on the learning data by changing its distribution in favour of a given bias. The objective of this paper is to provide solutions capable of significantly improving the predictive accuracy on rare cases in forecasting tasks using imbalanced time series data. We extend the application of resampling strategies to the time series context and introduce the concept of temporal and relevance bias in the case selection process of such strategies, presenting new proposals. We evaluate the results of standard forecasting tools and the use of resampling strategies, with and without bias over 24 time series data sets from six different sources. Results show a significant increase in predictive accuracy on rare cases associated with using resampling strategies, and the use of biased strategies further increases accuracy over non-biased strategies.