The modeling of time series based on fuzzy information granules

A lot of research has resulted in many time series models with high precision forecasting realized at the numerical level. However, in the real world, higher numerical precision may not be necessary for the perception, reasoning and decision-making of human. Model of time series with an ability of humans to perceive and process abstract entities (rather than numeric entities) is more adaptable for some problems of decision-making, With this regard, information granules and granular computing play a primordial role. Fox example, if change range (intervals) of stock prices for a certain period in the future is regarded as information granule, constructing model that can forecast change ranges (intervals) of stock prices for a period in the future is better able to help stock investors make reasonable decisions in comparison with those based upon specific forecasting numerical value of stock price. In this paper, we propose a new modeling approach to realize interval prediction, in which the idea of information granules and granular computing is integrated with the classical Chen's method. The proposed method is to segment an original numeric time series into a collection of time windows first, and then build fuzzy granules expressed as a certain fuzzy set over each time windows by exploiting the principle of justifiable granularity. Finally, fuzzy granular model can be constructed by mining fuzzy logical relationships of adjacent granules. The constructed model can carry out interval prediction by degranulation operation. Two benchmark time series are used to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. Besides, for modeling and prediction of large-scale time series, the proposed approach exhibit a clear advantage of reducing computation overhead of modeling and simplifying forecasting. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.