A good prediction of the future enables companies and governments to plan their investments, production and other needs. The demand for good forecasting techniques motivates many researchers coming from a wide variety of fields to develop methods for time series prediction. Many of these techniques are very complex to apply and demand lots of computational effort to execute. As an answer to this, we propose the use of Reservoir Computing, a recently developed technique for efficient training of recurrent neural networks, for monthly time series prediction. We will explain how Reservoir Computing in its basic form can be applied to time series prediction. Additionally we will extend this approach with different Reservoir Computing strategies such as seasonal adjustment or a Reservoir Computing based voting collective approach. We will investigate the performance of all the proposed strategies and compare its prediction accuracy with the linear forecasting procedure build in the Census Bureau's X-12-ARIMA program and a Nonlinear Autoregressive model using Least-Squares Support Vector Machines.
Recently, wyffels et al. REF have used reservoir computing, a form of recurrent neural networks, for time series prediction.
A comparative study of Reservoir Computing strategies for monthly time series prediction
Neurocomputing
Neurocomputing
Mathematics Computer Science