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Probability density forecast offers the whole distributions of forecasting targets, which brings greater flexibility and practicability than the other probabilistic forecast models such as prediction interval (PI) and quantile forecast. However, existing density forecast models have introduced various constraints on forecasted distributions, which has limited their ability to approximate real distributions and may result in suboptimality. In this paper, a distribution-free density forecast model based on deep learning is proposed, in which the real cumulative density functions (CDFs) of forecasting target are approximated by a large-capacity positive-weighted deep neural network (NN). Benefiting from the universal approximation ability of NNs, the range of forecasted distributions has been proven to contain all the distributions with continuous CDFs, which is superior to existing models’ considering both width and accordance with reality. Three tests from different scenarios were implemented for evaluation, i.e., very-short-term wind power, wind speed, and day-ahead electricity price forecast, in which the proposed density forecast model has shown superior performance over the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasting accuracy is an important issue for successful intelligent traffic management, especially in the domain of traffic efficiency and congestion reduction. The dawning of the big data era brings opportunities to greatly improve prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel model, stacked autoencoder Levenberg-Marquardt model, which is a type of deep architecture of neural network approach aiming to improve forecasting accuracy. The proposed model is designed using the Taguchi method to develop an optimized structure and to learn traffic flow features through layer-by-layer feature granulation with a greedy layerwise unsupervised learning algorithm. It is applied to real-world data collected from the M6 freeway in the U.K. and is compared with three existing traffic predictors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that an optimized structure of the traffic flow forecasting model with a deep learning approach is presented. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed model with an optimized structure has superior performance in traffic flow forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multistep-ahead forecasts can either be produced recursively by iterating a one-step-ahead time series model or directly by estimating a separate model for each forecast horizon. In addition, there are other strategies; some of them combine aspects of both aforementioned concepts. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation into the bias and variance behavior of multistep-ahead forecasting strategies. We provide a detailed review of the different multistep-ahead strategies. Subsequently, we perform a theoretical study that derives the bias and variance for a number of forecasting strategies. Finally, we conduct a Monte Carlo experimental study that compares and evaluates the bias and variance performance of the different strategies. From the theoretical and the simulation studies, we analyze the effect of different factors, such as the forecast horizon and the time series length, on the bias and variance components, and on the different multistep-ahead strategies. Several lessons are learned, and recommendations are given concerning the advantages, disadvantages, and best conditions of use of each strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]