Time series forecasting based on wavelet decomposition and feature extraction

Time series forecasting is one of the most important issues in numerous applications in real life. The objective of this study was to propose a hybrid neural network model based on wavelet transform (WT) and feature extraction for time series forecasting. The motivation of the proposed model, which is called PCA-WCCNN, is to establish a single simplified model with shorter training time and satisfactory forecasting performance. This model combines the principal component analysis (PCA) and WT with artificial neural networks (ANNs). Given a forecasting sequence, order of the original forecasting model is determined firstly. Secondly, the original time series is decomposed into approximation and detail components by employing WT technique. Then, instead of using all the components as inputs, feature inputs are extracted from all the sub-series obtained from the above step. Finally, based on the extracted features and all the sub-series, a famous neural network construction method called cascade-correlation algorithm is applied to train neural network model to learn the dynamics. As an illustration, the proposed model is compared with two classical models and two hybrid models, respectively. They are the traditional cascade-correlation neural network, back-propagation neural network, wavelet-based cascade-correlation network using all the wavelet components as inputs to establish one model (WCCNN) and wavelet-based cascade-correlation network with combination of each sub-series model (WCCNN multi-models). Results obtained from this study indicate that the proposed method improves the accuracy of ANN and can yield better efficiency than other four neural network models.