Pyramidal Hidden Markov Model For Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

The Hidden Markov Model (HMM) can predict the future value of a time series based on its current and previous values, making it a powerful algorithm for handling various types of time series. Numerous studies have explored the improvement of HMM using advanced techniques, leading to the development of several variations of HMM. Despite these studies indicating the increased competitiveness of HMM compared to other advanced algorithms, few have recognized the significance and impact of incorporating multistep stochastic states into its performance. In this work, we propose a Pyramidal Hidden Markov Model (PHMM) that can capture multiple multistep stochastic states. Initially, a multistep HMM is designed for extracting short multistep stochastic states. Next, a novel time series forecasting structure is proposed based on PHMM, which utilizes pyramid-like stacking to adaptively identify long multistep stochastic states. By employing these two schemes, our model can effectively handle non-stationary and noisy data, while also establishing long-term dependencies for more accurate and comprehensive forecasting. The experimental results on diverse multivariate time series datasets convincingly demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed PHMM compared to its competitive peers in time series forecasting.