The fable package for doing tidy forecasting in R is now on CRAN. Like tsibble and feasts, it is also part of the tidyverts family of packages for analysing, modelling and forecasting many related time series (stored as tsibbles).
For a brief introduction to tsibbles, see this post from last month.
Here we will forecast Australian tourism data by state/region and purpose. This data is stored in the tourism tsibble where Trips contains domestic visitor nights in thousands.
# A tsibble: 24,320 x 5 [1Q]
# Key: Region, State, Purpose [304]
Quarter Region State Purpose Trips
<qtr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <dbl>
1 1998 Q1 Adelaide South Australia Business 135.
2 1998 Q2 Adelaide South Australia Business 110.
3 1998 Q3 Adelaide South Australia Business 166.
4 1998 Q4 Adelaide South Australia Business 127.
5 1999 Q1 Adelaide South Australia Business 137.
6 1999 Q2 Adelaide South Australia Business 200.
7 1999 Q3 Adelaide South Australia Business 169.
8 1999 Q4 Adelaide South Australia Business 134.
9 2000 Q1 Adelaide South Australia Business 154.
10 2000 Q2 Adelaide South Australia Business 169.
# … with 24,310 more rows
There are 304 combinations of Region, State and Purpose, each one defining a time series of 80 observations.
To simplify the outputs, we will abbreviate the state names.
tourism <- tourism %>%mutate(State =recode(State,"Australian Capital Territory"="ACT","New South Wales"="NSW","Northern Territory"="NT","Queensland"="QLD","South Australia"="SA","Tasmania"="TAS","Victoria"="VIC","Western Australia"="WA" ) )
Forecasting a single time series
Although the fable package is designed to handle many time series, we will be begin by demonstrating its use on a single time series. For this purpose, we will extract the tourism data for holidays in the Snowy Mountains region of NSW.
snowy <- tourism %>%filter( Region =="Snowy Mountains", Purpose =="Holiday" )snowy
For this data set, a reasonable benchmark forecast method is the seasonal naive method, where forecasts are set to be equal to the last observed value from the same quarter. Alternative models for this series are ETS and ARIMA models. All these can be included in a single call to the model() function like this.
fit <- snowy %>%model(snaive =SNAIVE(Trips ~lag("year")),ets =ETS(Trips),arima =ARIMA(Trips) )fit
# A mable: 1 x 6
# Key: Region, State, Purpose [1]
Region State Purpose snaive ets arima
<chr> <chr> <chr> <model> <model> <model>
1 Snowy Mount… NSW Holiday <SNAIVE> <ETS(M,N,A)> <ARIMA(1,0,0)(0,1,2)[4]>
The returned object is called a “mable” or model table, where each cell corresponds to a fitted model. Because we have only fitted models to one time series, this mable has only one row.
To forecast all models, we pass the object to the forecast function.
The return object is a “fable” or forecast table with the following characteristics:
the .model column becomes an additional key;
the .distribution column contains the estimated probability distribution of the response variable in future time periods;
the Trips column contains the point forecasts equal to the mean of the probability distribution.
The autoplot() function will produce a plot of all forecasts. By default, level=c(80,95) so 80% and 95% prediction intervals are shown. But to avoid clutter, we will set level=NULL to show no prediction intervals.
fc %>%autoplot(snowy, level =NULL) +ggtitle("Forecasts for Snowy Mountains holidays") +xlab("Year") +guides(colour =guide_legend(title ="Forecast"))
If you want to compute the prediction intervals, the hilo() function can be used:
To scale this up to include all series in the tourism data set requires no more work — we use exactly the same code.
fit <- tourism %>%model(snaive =SNAIVE(Trips ~lag("year")),ets =ETS(Trips),arima =ARIMA(Trips) )fit
# A mable: 304 x 6
# Key: Region, State, Purpose [304]
Region State Purpose snaive ets
<chr> <chr> <chr> <model> <model>
1 Adelaide SA Business <SNAIVE> <ETS(M,N,M)>
2 Adelaide SA Holiday <SNAIVE> <ETS(A,N,A)>
3 Adelaide SA Other <SNAIVE> <ETS(M,A,N)>
4 Adelaide SA Visiting <SNAIVE> <ETS(A,N,A)>
5 Adelaide Hills SA Business <SNAIVE> <ETS(A,N,N)>
6 Adelaide Hills SA Holiday <SNAIVE> <ETS(A,A,N)>
7 Adelaide Hills SA Other <SNAIVE> <ETS(A,N,N)>
8 Adelaide Hills SA Visiting <SNAIVE> <ETS(M,A,M)>
9 Alice Springs NT Business <SNAIVE> <ETS(M,N,M)>
10 Alice Springs NT Holiday <SNAIVE> <ETS(M,N,A)>
# … with 294 more rows, and 1 more variable: arima <model>
Now the mable includes models for every combination of keys in the tourism data set.
We can extract information about some specific model using the filter, select and report functions.
fit %>%filter(Region =="Snowy Mountains", Purpose =="Holiday") %>%select(arima) %>%report()
When the mable is passed to the forecast() function, forecasts are computed for every model and every key combination.
fc <- fit %>%forecast(h ="3 years")fc
# A fable: 10,944 x 7 [1Q]
# Key: Region, State, Purpose, .model [912]
Region State Purpose .model Quarter Trips .mean
<chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <qtr> <dist> <dbl>
1 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2018 Q1 N(129, 2018) 129.
2 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2018 Q2 N(174, 2018) 174.
3 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2018 Q3 N(185, 2018) 185.
4 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2018 Q4 N(197, 2018) 197.
5 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2019 Q1 N(129, 4036) 129.
6 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2019 Q2 N(174, 4036) 174.
7 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2019 Q3 N(185, 4036) 185.
8 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2019 Q4 N(197, 4036) 197.
9 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2020 Q1 N(129, 6054) 129.
10 Adelaide SA Business snaive 2020 Q2 N(174, 6054) 174.
# … with 10,934 more rows
Note the use of natural language to specify the forecast horizon. The forecast() function is able to interpret many different time specifications. For quarterly data, h = "3 years" is equivalent to setting h = 12.
Plots of individual forecasts can also be produced, although filtering is helpful to avoid plotting too many series at once.
To compare the forecast accuracy of these models, we will create a training data set containing all data up to 2014. We will then forecast the remaining years in the data set and compare the results with the actual values.
Here we have introduced an ensemble forecast (mixed) which is a simple average of the three fitted models. Note that forecast() will produce distributional forecasts from the ensemble as well, taking into account the correlations between the forecast errors of the component models.
fc <- fit %>%forecast(h ="3 years")
fc %>%filter(Region =="Snowy Mountains") %>%autoplot(tourism, level =NULL)
Now to check the accuracy, we use the accuracy() function. By default it computes several point forecasting accuracy measures such as MAE, RMSE, MAPE and MASE for every key combination.
accuracy(fc, tourism)
# A tibble: 1,216 × 13
.model Region State Purpose .type ME RMSE MAE MPE MAPE MASE
<chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 arima Adela… SA Busine… Test 22.5 28.5 25.3 11.9 14.0 0.765
2 arima Adela… SA Holiday Test 21.9 34.8 28.0 9.93 14.8 1.31
3 arima Adela… SA Other Test 4.71 17.5 14.6 0.529 20.2 1.11
4 arima Adela… SA Visiti… Test 32.8 37.1 32.8 13.7 13.7 1.05
5 arima Adela… SA Busine… Test 1.31 5.58 3.57 -Inf Inf 1.09
6 arima Adela… SA Holiday Test 6.46 7.43 6.46 37.4 37.4 1.14
7 arima Adela… SA Other Test 1.35 2.79 1.93 -31.0 99.4 1.71
8 arima Adela… SA Visiti… Test 8.37 12.6 10.4 -3.98 72.3 1.35
9 arima Alice… NT Busine… Test 9.85 12.2 10.7 34.4 44.3 1.74
10 arima Alice… NT Holiday Test 4.80 11.3 9.30 4.46 35.2 1.00
# … with 1,206 more rows, and 2 more variables: RMSSE <dbl>, ACF1 <dbl>
But because we have generated distributional forecasts, it is also interesting to look at the accuracy using CRPS (Continuous Rank Probability Scores) and Winkler Scores (for 95% prediction intervals).
In this case, the mixed model is doing best on all accuracy measures.
Moving from forecast to fable
Many readers will be familiar with the forecast package and will wonder about the differences between forecast and fable. Here are some of the main differences.
fable is designed for tsibble objects, forecast is designed for ts objects.
fable handles many time series at a time, forecast handles one time series at a time.
fable can fit multiple models at once, forecast fits one model at a time.
forecast produces point forecasts and prediction intervals. fable produces point forecasts and distribution forecasts. In fable, you can get prediction intervals from the forecast object using hilo() and in plots using autoplot().
fable handles ensemble forecasting easily whereas forecast has no facilities for ensembles.
fable has a more consistent interface with every model specified as a formula.
Automated modelling in fable is obtained by simply not specifying the right hand side of the formula. This was shown in the ARIMA() and ETS() functions here.
Subsequent posts will explore other features of the fable package.