Recommender Systems

We use 6 Recommender Systems’ Algorithms:

  1. Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) is a commonly-used local statistical algorithm for time-series forecasting. ARIMA captures standard temporal structures (patterned organizations of time) in the input dataset. The Amazon Forecast ARIMA algorithm calls the Arima function in the Package 'forecast' of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).
  2. Amazon Forecast DeepAR+ is a supervised learning algorithm for forecasting scalar (one-dimensional) time series using recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Classical forecasting methods, such as autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) or exponential smoothing (ETS), fit a single model to each individual time series, and then use that model to extrapolate the time series into the future. In many applications, however, you have many similar time series across a set of cross-sectional units. These time-series groupings demand different products, server loads, and requests for web pages. In this case, it can be beneficial to train a single model jointly over all of the time series. DeepAR+ takes this approach. When your dataset contains hundreds of feature time series, the DeepAR+ algorithm outperforms the standard ARIMA and ETS methods. You can also use the trained model for generating forecasts for new time series that are similar to the ones it has been trained on.
  3. Exponential Smoothing (ETS) is a commonly-used local statistical algorithm for time-series forecasting. The Amazon Forecast ETS algorithm calls the ets function in the Package 'forecast' of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).
  4. Our Non-Parametric Time Series (NPTS) algorithm is a scalable, probabilistic baseline forecaster. It predicts the future value distribution of a given time series by sampling from past observations. The predictions are bounded by the observed values. NPTS is especially useful when the time series is intermittent (or sparse, containing many 0s) and bursty. For example, forecasting demand for individual items where the time series has many low counts. Amazon Forecast provides variants of NPTS that differ in which of the past observations are sampled and how they are sampled. To use an NPTS variant, you choose a hyperparameter setting.
  5. Prophet is a popular local Bayesian structural time series model. The Amazon Forecast Prophet algorithm uses the Prophet class of the Python implementation of Prophet.
  6. Convolutional Neural Network – Quantile Regression(CNN-QR), is a proprietary machine learning algorithm for forecasting scalar (one-dimensional) time series using causal convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This supervised learning algorithm trains one global model from a large collection of time series and uses a quantile decoder to make probabilistic predictions.