{"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/machine-learning-vs-statistical-methods-for","title":"Machine Learning vs Statistical Methods for Time Series Forecasting: Size Matters","arxiv_id":"1909.13316","date":"2019-09-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Vitor Cerqueira","Luis Torgo","Carlos Soares"],"abstract":"Time series forecasting is one of the most active research topics. Machine learning methods have been increasingly adopted to solve these predictive tasks. However, in a recent work, these were shown to systematically present a lower predictive performance relative to simple statistical methods. In this work, we counter these results. We show that these are only valid under an extremely low sample size. Using a learning curve method, our results suggest that machine learning methods improve their relative predictive performance as the sample size grows. The code to reproduce the experiments is available at https://github.com/vcerqueira/MLforForecasting.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.13316v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.13316v1.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":"machine-learning-vs-statistical-methods-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/vcerqueira/MLforForecasting","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-learning","task_name":"BIG-bench Machine Learning"},{"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"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"valid"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}