SimpleTS: An Efficient and Universal Model Selection Framework for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting, that predicts events through a sequence of time, has received increasing attention in past decades. The diverse range of time series forecasting models presents a challenge for selecting the most suitable model for a given dataset. As such, the Alibaba Cloud database monitoring system must address the issue of selecting an optimal forecasting model for a single time series data. While several model selection frameworks, including AutoAI-TS, have been developed to predict a dataset, their effectiveness may be limited as they may not adapt well to all types of time series, resulting in reduced prediction accuracy. Alternatively, models such as AutoForecast, which train on individual data points, may offer better adaptability but are limited by longer training time required. In this paper, we introduce SimpleTS, a versatile framework for time series forecasting that exhibits high efficiency and accuracy across all types of time series data. When performing an online prediction task, SimpleTS first classifies input time series into one type, and then efficiently selects the most suitable prediction model for this type. To optimize performance, SimpleTS (i) clusters models with similar performance to improve the efficiency of classification; (ii) uses soft labeling and weighted representation learning to achieve higher classification accuracy for different time series types. Extensive experiments on 3 private datasets and 52 public datasets show that SimpleTS outperforms the state-of-the-art toolkits in terms of both training time and prediction accuracy.