Why does the RMSE gets worse with my VAR Model - prediction

i have a weekly aggregated data set and i splitted it in 80% Train and 20% Test.
I am performing a one step a head forecast. However as the length becomes larger the performance get really bad. Is that Normal?
The first few steps are predicted okayish.
Plot Description

This seems like normal behavior. The forecasts of your model are based on the last observations of your time series. Let us say as an example, the forecast for October 1st is based on the values from September. Now, for October 1st you have 30 correct values from September. Depending on how good your model is, the prediction will deviate a little bit from the true value. When you predict October 2nd, you use 29 correct values from September and the previously predicted value for October 1st. This is called dynamic forecasting. The forecasting error from this prediction is now fed into the model, which impacts the quality of the forecast for October 2nd. If you predict October 3rd, you have 28 correct input values and already two with a slight deviation.
The values for November will be based on forecasts entirely and all forecasting errors in October are fed into the model. Your predictions for July are based on predictions that were based on predictions and so on. Therefore, the predictions get worse and worse the further you forecast into the future and at some points they tend to converge into a straight line.
For this reason, you cannot really predict that far into the future very often. 65 steps is very far into the future and I guess that is too much for ARIMA/VAR.

Related

Tableau Summing up aggregated data with FIXED

Data granularity is per customer, per invoice date, per product type.
Generally the idea is simple:
We have a moving average calculation of the volume per week. MA based on last 12 weeks (MA Volume):
window_sum(sum([Volume]),-11,0)/window_count(count([Volume]), -11,0)
We need to see the deviation of the current week vs the MA for that week (Vol DIFF):
SUM([Volume])-[MA Calc]
We need to sum up the deviations for a fixed period of time (Year/Month)
Basically this should show us whether on average, for a given period of time, we deviate positively or negatively vs the base.
enter image description here
Unfortunately I get errors like:
"Argument to SUM (an aggregate function) is already an aggregation, and cannot be further aggregated."
Or
"Level of detail expressions cannot contain table calculations or the ATTR function"
Any ideas how I can go around this one?
Managed to solve this one. Needed to add months to the view and then just WINDOW_SUM(Vol_DIFF).
Simple as that!

Cyclic transformation of dates

I would like to use the day of the year in a machine learning model. As the day of the year is not continuous (day 365 of 2019 is followed by day 1 in 2020), I think of performing cyclic (sine or cosine) transformation, following this link.
However, in each year, there are no unique values of the new transformed variable; for example, two values for 0.5 in the same year, see figures below.
I need to be able to use the day of the year in model training and also in prediction. For a value of 0.5 in the sine transformation, it can be on either 31.01.2019 or 31.05.2019, then using 0.5 value can be confusing for the model.
Is it possible to make the model to differentiate between the two values of 0.5 within the same year?
I am modelling the distribution of a species using Maxent software. The species data is continuous every day in 20 years. I need the model to capture the signal of the day or the season, without using either of them explicitly as categorical variable.
Thanks
EDIT1
Based on furcifer's comment below. However, I find the Incremental modelling approach not useful for my application. It solves the issue of consistent difference between subsequent days; e.g. 30.12.2018, 31.12.2018, and 01.01.2019. But it does not differ than counting the number of days from a certain reference day (weight = 1). Having much higher values on the same date for 2019 than 2014 does not make ecological sense. I hope that interannual changes to be captured from the daily environmental conditions used (explanatory variables). The reason for my need to use day in the model is to capture the seasonal trend of the distribution of a migratory species, without the explicit use of month or season as a categorical variable. To predict suitable habitats for today, I need to make this prediction not only depends on the environmental conditions of today but also on the day of the year.
This is a common problem, but I'm not sure if there is a perfect solution. One thing I would note is that there are two things that you might want to model with your date variable:
Seasonal effects
Season-independent trends and autocorrelation
For seasonal effects, the cyclic transformation is sometimes used for linear models, but I don't see the sense for ML models - with enough data, you would expect a nice connection at the edges, so what's the problem? I think the posts you link to are a distraction, or at least they do not properly explain why and when a cyclic transformation is useful. I would just use dYear to model the seasonal effect.
However, the discontinuity might be a problem for modelling trends / autocorrelation / variation in the time series that is not seasonal, or common between years. For that reason, I would add an absolute date to the model, so use
y = dYear + dAbsolute + otherPredictors
A well-tuned ML model should be able to do the rest, with the usual caveats, and if you have enough data.
This may not the right choice depending on your needs, there are two choices that comes to my mind.
Incremental modeling
In this case, the dates are modeled in a linear fashion, so say 12 Dec, 2018 < 12, Dec, 2019.
For this you just need some form of transformation function that converts dates to numeric values.
As there are many dates that need to be converted to numeric representation, the first thing to make sure is that the output list also has the same order as Lukas mentioned. The easiest way to do this is by adding weight to each unit (weight_year > weight_month > weight_day).
def date2num(date_time):
d, m, y = date_time.split('-')
num = int(d)*10 + int(m)*100 + int(y)*1000 # these weights can be anything as long as
# they are ordered
return num
Now, it's important to normalize the numeric values.
import numpy as np
date_features = []
for d in list(df['date_time']):
date_features.append(date2num(d))
date_features = np.array(date_features)
date_features_normalized = (date_features - np.min(date_features))/(np.max(date_features) - np.min(date_features))
Using the day, month, year as separate features. So, instead of considering the date as whole, we segregate. The motivation is that maybe there will be some relations between the output and a specific date, month, etc. Like, maybe the output suddenly increases in the summer season (specific months) or maybe on weekends (specific days)

Interesting results from LSTM RNN : lagged results for train and validation data

As an introduction to RNN/LSTM (stateless) I'm training a model with sequences of 200 days of previous data (X), including things like daily price change, daily volume change, etc and for the labels/Y I have the % price change from current price to that in 4 months. Basically I want to estimate the market direction, not to be 100% accurate. But I'm getting some odd results...
When I then test my model with the training data, I notice the output from the model is a perfect fit when compared to the actual data, it just lags by exactly 4 months:
When I shift the data by 4 months, you can see it's a perfect fit.
I can obviously understand why the training data would be a very close fit as it has seen it all during training - but why the 4 months lag?
It does the same thing with the validation data (note the area I highlighted with the red box for future reference):
Time-shifted:
It's not as close-fitting as the training data, as you'd expect, but still too close for my liking - I just don't think it can be this accurate (see the little blip in the red rectangle as an example). I think the model is acting as a naive predictor, I just can't work out how/why it's possibly doing it.
To generate this output from the validation data, I input a sequence of 200 timesteps, but there's nothing in the data sequence that says what the %price change will be in 4 months - it's entirely disconnected, so how is it so accurate? The 4-month lag is obviously another indicator that something's not right here, I don't know how to explain that, but I suspect the two are linked.
I tried to explain the observation based on some general underlying concept:
If you don't provide a time-lagged X input dataset (lagged t-k where k is the time steps), then basically you will be feeding the LSTM with like today's closing price to predict the same today's closing price..in the training stage. The model will (over fit) and behave Exactly as the answer is known already (data leakage)
If the Y is the predicted percentage change (ie. X * (1 + Y%) = 4 months future price), the present value Yvalue predicted really is just the future discounted by the Y%
so the predicted value will have 4 months shift
Okay, I realised my error; the way I was using the model to generate the forecast line was naive. For every date in the graph above, I was getting an output from the model, and then apply the forecasted % change to the actual price for that date - that would give predicted price in 4 months' time.
Given the markets usually only move within a margin of 0-3% (plus or minus) over a 4 month period, that would mean my forecasts was always going to closely mirror the current price, just with a 4 month lag.
So at every date the predicted output was being re-based, so the model line would never deviate far from the actual; it'd be the same, but within a margin of 0-3% (plus or minus).
Really, the graph isn't important, and it doesn't reflect the way I'll use the output anyway, so I'm going to ditch trying to get a visual representation, and concentrate on trying to find different metrics that lower the validation loss.

Dymola / Modelica - District heating

I am trying to validate a district heating model I built using Dymola.
In this case, I am trying to find the mass flow during a year period. I have two models running. both with the same loads and pipes with same characteristics as this picture:
pipes
Both models are as follows:
models
My results are making sense at least regarding the time of the year my flow should be higher, I am getting very high values during January, February and March, then again by the end of the year.
However those high peaks are VERY different, the first model on the picture is giving me peaks of almost 400kg/s whereas the second one is reaching up to 70kg/s.
Can anyone suggest a way to validate the model? I have the heat loads for the year hour by hour (this is the input I am giving to Dymola), I know that the min temperature of the water is 70 and the max is 85 celsius.
But I am really struggling to validate my model. Any suggestions?

Calculating IV60, and IV90 on interactive brokers

I am trading options, but I need to calculate the historical implied volatility in the last year. I am using Interactive Broker's TWS. Unfortunately they only calculate V30 (the implied volatility of the stock using options that will expire in 30 days). I need to calculate the implied volatility of the stock using options that will expire in 60 days, and 90 days.
The problem: Calculate the implied volatility of at least a whole year of an individual stock using options that will expire in 60 days and 90 days giving that:
TWS does not provide V60 or V90.
TWS does not provide historical pricing data for individual options for more than 3 months.
The attempted solution:
Use the V30 that TWS provide too come up with V60 and V90 giving the fact that usually option prices will behave like a skew (horizontal skew). However, the problem to this attempted solution is that the skew does not always have a positive slope, so I can't come up with a mathematical solution to always correctly estimate IV60 and IV90 as this can have a positive or negative slope like in the picture below.
Any ideas?
Your question is either confusing or isn't about programming. This is what IB says.
The IB 30-day volatility is the at-market volatility estimated for a
maturity thirty calendar days forward of the current trading day, and
is based on option prices from two consecutive expiration months.
It makes no sense to me and I can't even get those ticks to arrive (generic type 24). But even if you get them, they don't seem to be useful. My guess is it's an average to estimate what the IV would be for an option expiring exactly 30 days in the future. I can't imagine the purpose for this. The data would be impossible to trade with and doesn't represent reality. Imagine an earnings report at 29 or 31 days!
If you'd like the IV about 60 or 90 days in the future call reqMktData with an option contract that expires around then and an empty generic tick list. You will get tick types 10, 11, 12, and 13 which all have an IV. That's how you build the IV surface. If you'd like to build it with a weighted average to estimate 60 days, it's possible.
This is python but should be self explanatory
tickerId = 1
optCont = Contract()
optCont.m_localSymbol = "AAPL 170120C00130000"
optCont.m_exchange = "SMART"
optCont.m_currency = "USD"
optCont.m_secType = "OPT"
tws.reqMktData(tickerId, optCont, "", False)
Then I get data like
<tickOptionComputation tickerId=1, field=10, impliedVol=0.20363398519176756, delta=0.0186015418248492, optPrice=0.03999999910593033, pvDividend=0.0, gamma=0.007611155331932943, vega=0.012855970569816431, theta=-0.005936076573849303, undPrice=116.735001>
If there's something I'm missing about options, you should ask this at https://quant.stackexchange.com/