Flow Forecast is a recently created open-source framework that aims to make it easy to use state of the art machine learning models to forecast and/or classify complex temporal data. Additionally, flow-forecast natively integrates with Google Cloud Platform, Weights and Biases, Colaboratory, and other tools commonly used in industry.
Background
In some of my previous articles I talked about the need for accurate time series forecasts and the promise of using deep learning. Flow-Forecast was originally, created to forecast stream and river flows using variations of the transformer and baseline models. However, in the process of training the transformers I encountered several issues related to finding the right hyper-parameters and the right architecture. Therefore, it became necessary to develop a platform for trying out many configurations. Flow forecast is designed to allow you to very easily try out a number of different hyper-parameters and training options for your models. Changing a model is as simple as swapping out the model’s name in the configuration file.
Another problem I faced was how to integrate additional static datasets into the forecasts. For river flow forecasting, there was a lot of meta-data such as latitude, longitude, soil depth, elevation, slope, etc. For this, we decided to look into unsupervised methods like autoencoders for forming an embedding. This spurred the idea of creating a generic way to synthesize embedding with the temporal forecast.
Using flow forecast
There are a couple easy resources to use to get started with flow-forecast. I recorded a brief introduction video back in May and there are also more detailed live-coding sessions you can follow. We also have a basic tutorial notebook that you can use to get a sense of how flow-forecast works on a basic problem. Additionally, there are also a lot more detailed notebooks that we use for our core COVID-19 predictions. Finally, we also have ReadTheDocs available for in depth documentation as well as our official wiki pages.
#machine-learning #pytorch #time-series-analysis #time-series-forecasting #deep-learning #deep learning
