Open Issues and Challenges on Time Series Forecasting for Water Consumption Full text

Pantelis Chronis, Giorgos Giannopoulos, Spiros Athanasiou
EDBT/ICDT Workshops 2016
2016
Conference/Workshop
Abstract. In this paper, we study the problem of water consumption forecasting, an instance of the general time series forecasting problem, that has not been explored adequately. We base our analysis on two types of data: aggregate and individual consumptions measured by Smart Water Meters. We evaluate a series of state of the art forecasting algorithms and showcase that these models are not suitable for every instance of the forecasting problem: while they work effectively on aggregated data that contain strong seasonal patterns, their performance drops dramatically on individual user consumption time series, where such patterns are weaker. To this end, we identify open issues and challenges on the problem and, also demonstrate that a simpler model we propose can outperform several of the aforementioned algorithms, although still needing significant improvements.