Paper:
Deep State Space Models for Time Series Forecasting
We present a novel approach to probabilistic time series forecasting that combines state space models with deep learning. By parametrizing a per-time-series linear state space model with a jointly-learned recurrent neural network, our method retains desired properties of state space models such as data efficiency and interpretability, while making use of the ability to learn complex patterns from raw data offered by deep learning approaches. Our method scales gracefully from regimes where little training data is available to regimes where data from large collection of time series can be leveraged to learn accurate models. We provide qualitative as well as quantitative results with the proposed method, showing that it compares favorably to the state-of-the-art.

Review:
This paper proposes introducing deep neural networks to output the time-varying parameters of a linear state-space model (SSM), preserving the analytical tractability of SSM (e.g. Kalman filtering equations, in the case of a Gaussian likelihood) with increased flexibility coming from time-varying SSM parameters. In the paper, an LSTM maps from the covariates to the set of SSM parameters, and the LSTM captures time-series effects in the parameters.  Overall, the paper is very well written and quite easy to follow. The review of SSM is adequate, and the connection with the proposed approach is well made and intuitive. As to the technical contribution itself, the DeepState method of incorporating deep neural networks within a SSM appears novel, and worthy of study within the important topic of time series forecasting. Important connections to the recent literature, such as Fraccaro et al. (2017), Johnson et al (2016) and Krishnan et al. (2017) are provided, and helpful.  I have three main questions & comments for this review.  First, as stated on lines 125-130, the main use of the LSTM is to non-linearly map from covariates to SSM parameters (sharing this mapping across all time series). An obvious question is why are past observations of a given time series not also provided as adjunct to the covariates, not unlike the treatment within DeepAR. Are there identifiability issues to doing so? This should merit some discussion in the paper.  Second, the experimental evaluation first seeks to recover known generative parameters on synthetic data, which it appears to successfully carry out. Sadly, the evaluation on real datasets is somewhat disappointing, with a comparison against only two multi-series datasets. The evaluation metric is limited to the quantile loss, which is considers all time-steps over the prediction horizon to be independent of one another — whereas the proposed method (as stated on line 83) aims at making predictions over complete future trajectories. It would have been nice to report some measure of the predictive likelihood of this distribution over complete trajectories (using, e.g., some form of kernel density estimation to smooth over the Monte Carlo predictions). Moreover, the loss function QL is a normalized variant of the well-known pinball loss, but a citation would nonetheless be in order. Separately, the set of comparison models leaves to be desired and does not allow appreciating the contribution to performance of the different model components. It is not clear whether the auto.arima and ets model have access to the covariates that DeepState and DeepAR have. Since DeepState extends well-known SSMs, it should test against two simple baselines: (1) a standard fixed-parameter Linear Dynamical System (LDS) that does not use covariates, and (2) one that does use them linearly. Moreover, it would be helpful to run a modicum of ablation studies, e.g. removing the recurrence in the neural network, and varying the dimensionality of the hidden state h_t (which does not appear to be reported).  Third and finally, the section 4.3 is interesting and relevant, but seems to have been hastily written and does not really fit within the rest of the manuscript. In particular, none of the experiments make use of the approach, which would be best suitable in contexts where the time series consist of non-negative observations, with possibly fat tails.  Overall, I think the paper proposes a fruitful line of inquiry, but remains in too early a state to recommend acceptance at NIPS. [Update: I think the authors' rebuttal was helpful, including running additional experiments, and with the proposed changes I have updated by score to a 6.]   Detailed comments:  * Line 52: efffects ==> effects * Line 61: dependent ==> depend * Line 77: acronym LDS (presumably Linear Dynamical System) is not defined * Line 88: are the covariates always assumed to be non-stochastic, even over the prediction range? * Eq. (2): it’s not clear why the innovation \epsilon_t is assumed to be a scalar, which forces the random disturbance to the latent state to be strictly along g_t. In many state-space models, the transition dynamics is assumed to have noise dimension to be equal to the latent space dimension, so this discrepancy should be explained.  * Line 114: the dynamics is ==> the dynamics are * Footnote 3: the the ==> the * Equation 8: should be more careful about notation, in particular indicating that the integration is carried out wrt variables u and l. * Line 238-240: notation overload with \tau used to denote forecast horizon and evaluation quantile. * References [8] and [9] are identical. * Add to to background work on linear state space models, this paper of relevance: Chapados, N., 2014. Effective Bayesian Modeling of Groups of Related Count Time Series. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 1395-1403).