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In life, timing is critical.
Accurate and reliable time-dependent forecasts could help every organization saveand earnbillions of dollars.
Time series forecasting is the bread and butter of what drives an enterprise.
These models do not need to be the equivalent of an AI sledgehammer to drive results.
Vice President of AI and Automation at IBM Research.
How can time series AI models predict the future?
Time series foundation models look for patterns in historical observations to “understand” a temporal process.
These abstract representations are what allow the models to solve predictive tasks.
The longer the time series, the better the forecast.
However, these kinds of measurements pose complications in ways that words, code and pixels do not.
There’s a lot of data to process, and its sequential order and directionality must be strictly preserved.
Compressing disparate observations into an abstract representation is an enormous challenge.
In addition, different sets of time series data are often highly correlated.
In the real world, complex events arise from multiple factors.
For example, air temperature, pressure, and humidity strongly interact to drive the weather.
Home heater sales, for example, may be tied to quirky weather or the economy.
Can smaller models pre-trained purely on limited public diverse time series datasets deliver better forecasting accuracy?
It turns out that the answer is yes!
Experimentation with the development of tiny foundation models significantly less than 1B parameters is now well underway.
They also can support cross-channel and external variables critical features that existing popular methods lack.
They are also flexible enough to be extended to other time series tasks beyond forecasting.
They are poised to become the workhorses of enterprise AI.
In the next few years AI is expected to help progress a radical transformation in the business landscape.
While most of the worlds public data feeds current models, a vast majority of enterprise data remains untapped.
We feature the best AI tools currently available.
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