Selego: Robust Variate Selection for Accurate Time Series Forecasting and its Application in Fault Detection

The need of effective forecasting models for multi-variate time series has been underlined by the integration of sensory technologies into essential applications such as building energy optimizations, flight monitoring, and health monitoring. To meet this requirement, time series prediction techniques have been expanded from uni-variate to multi-variate. However, due to the extended models’ poor ability to capture the intrinsic relationships among variates, naïve extensions of prediction approaches result in an unwanted rise in the cost of model learning and, more critically, a significant loss in model performance. While recurrent models like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Recurrent Neural Network Network (RNN) are designed to capture the temporal intricacies in data, their performance can soon deteriorate. First, I claim in this thesis that (a) by exploiting temporal alignments of variates to quantify the importance of the recorded variates in relation to a target variate, one can build a more accurate forecasting model. I also argue that (b) traditional time series similarity/distance functions, such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), which require that variates have similar absolute patterns are fundamentally ill-suited for this purpose, and that should instead quantify temporal correlation in terms of temporal alignments of key “events” impacting these series, rather than series similarity. Further, I propose that (c) while learning a temporal model with recurrence-based techniques (such as RNN and LSTM – even when leveraging attention strategies) is challenging and expensive, the better results can be obtained by coupling simpler CNNs with an adaptive variate selection strategy. Putting these together, I introduce a novel Selego framework for variate selection based on these arguments, and I experimentally evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on various forecasting models, such as LSTM, RNN, and CNN, for different top-X% percent variates and different forecasting time in the future (lead), on multiple real-world data sets. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can reduce the number of recorded variates required to train predictive models by 90 - 98% while also increasing accuracy. Finally, I present a fault onset detection technique that leverages the precise baseline forecasting models trained using the Selego framework. The proposed, Selego-enabled Fault Detection Framework (FDF-Selego) has been experimentally evaluated within the context of detecting the onset of faults in the building Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system.