The finnts package leverages the great work of the hts package. It’s currently retired but we think old dogs can still learn new tricks! It’s still of great use to finnts and allows for both standard and grouped hierarchical forecasting.
A standard hierarchy of data is pretty straight forward. Each combo variable can be aggregated into the next combo variable when producing forecasts at higher aggregations of the data. This structure resembles a pyramid, with the bottom being the lowest granularity of time series and the top being a single time series of the grand total of the data. Below is a good example with geographical combo variables that can be aggregated into one another when building a standard hierarchy forecast.
#> Standard Hierarchical Time Series Data
#> # A tibble: 9 x 5
#> Continent Country City Date Target
#> <chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <dbl>
#> 1 North America United States Kansas City 2020-01-01 100
#> 2 North America United States Kansas City 2020-02-01 250
#> 3 North America United States Kansas City 2020-03-01 320
#> 4 North America United States Seattle 2020-01-01 80
#> 5 North America United States Seattle 2020-02-01 200
#> 6 North America United States Seattle 2020-03-01 270
#> 7 North America Mexico Mexico City 2020-01-01 50
#> 8 North America Mexico Mexico City 2020-02-01 80
#> 9 North America Mexico Mexico City 2020-03-01 120In the above example, “City” was the lowest level of the hierarchy, which feeds into “Country”, which then feeds into “Continent”. Finn will take this data and will forecast by City, total Country, and total Continent. After each model is ran for every level in the hierarchy, the best model is chosen at each level, then the “Best Model” and every other model is reconciled back down to the lowest level.
Grouped hierarchies are very different than the traditional hierarchy approach described above. There are some data sets that can be aggregated in various ways, meaning they need to follow another approach the hts package calls “grouped”. A good example is a data set that contains historical time series by geography, customer segment, and product.
#> Grouped Hierarchical Time Series Data
#> # A tibble: 12 x 5
#> Country Segment Product Date Target
#> <chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <dbl>
#> 1 United States Enterprise Coffee 2020-01-01 10
#> 2 United States Enterprise Coffee 2020-02-01 20
#> 3 United States Enterprise Coffee 2020-03-01 30
#> 4 United States Public Sector Coffee 2020-01-01 5
#> 5 United States Public Sector Coffee 2020-02-01 8
#> 6 United States Public Sector Coffee 2020-03-01 11
#> 7 Mexico Enterprise Coffee 2020-01-01 20
#> 8 Mexico Enterprise Coffee 2020-02-01 23
#> 9 Mexico Enterprise Coffee 2020-03-01 27
#> 10 Mexico Enterprise Tea 2020-01-01 50
#> 11 Mexico Enterprise Tea 2020-02-01 55
#> 12 Mexico Enterprise Tea 2020-03-01 60It would be hard to aggregate the above data in a traditional hierarchy. The same products are found in different segments and countries, also the same segments are found in multiple countries. Finn will follow a similar modeling process as the one described for a traditional hierarchy, but instead will create forecasts at the below levels.
Currently finnts does not allow for external regressors to be used in a hierarchical forecast. This is something we plan to implement in a future release. If you select a hierarchical forecast method and include external regressor input values, Finn will ignore the external regressors and will not use them in modeling.