Extending the Scope of Automatic Time Series Model Selection: The Package autots for R

Abstract

In this paper, we propose automatic procedures for the model selection of various univariate time series data. Automatic model selection is important, especially in data mining with large number of time series, for example, the number (in thousands) of signals accessing a web server during a specific time period. Several methods have been proposed for automatic model selection of time series. However, most existing methods focus on linear time series models such as exponential smoothing and autoregressive integrated moving average(ARIMA) models. The key feature that distinguishes the proposed procedures from previous approaches is that the former can be used for both linear time series models and nonlinear time series models such as threshold autoregressive(TAR) models and autoregressive moving average-generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity(ARMA-GARCH) models. The proposed methods select a model from among the various models in the prediction error sense. We also provide an R package autots that implements the proposed automatic model selection procedures. In this paper, we illustrate these algorithms with the artificial and real data, and describe the implementation of the autots package for R.