{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/automatic-forecasting-using-gaussian","title":"Time series forecasting with Gaussian Processes needs priors","arxiv_id":"2009.08102","date":"2020-09-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Giorgio Corani","Alessio Benavoli","Marco Zaffalon"],"abstract":"Automatic forecasting is the task of receiving a time series and returning a forecast for the next time steps without any human intervention. Gaussian Processes (GPs) are a powerful tool for modeling time series, but so far there are no competitive approaches for automatic forecasting based on GPs. We propose practical solutions to two problems: automatic selection of the optimal kernel and reliable estimation of the hyperparameters. We propose a fixed composition of kernels, which contains the components needed to model most time series: linear trend, periodic patterns, and other flexible kernel for modeling the non-linear trend. Not all components are necessary to model each time series; during training the unnecessary components are automatically made irrelevant via automatic relevance determination (ARD). We moreover assign priors to the hyperparameters, in order to keep the inference within a plausible range; we design such priors through an empirical Bayes approach. We present results on many time series of different types; our GP model is more accurate than state-of-the-art time series models. Thanks to the priors, a single restart is enough the estimate the hyperparameters; hence the model is also fast to train.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.08102v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.08102v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"automatic-forecasting-using-gaussian","repo_url":"https://github.com/IDSIA/gpforecasting","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"gaussian-processes","task_name":"Gaussian Processes"},{"task_slug":"time-series-1","task_name":"Time Series"},{"task_slug":"time-series","task_name":"Time Series Analysis"},{"task_slug":"time-series-forecasting","task_name":"Time Series Forecasting"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2009.08102","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2009.08102"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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