AA-forecast: anomaly-aware forecast for extreme events

Time series models often are impacted by extreme events and anomalies, both prevalent in real-world datasets. Such models require careful probabilistic forecasts, which is vital in risk management for extreme events such as hurricanes and pandemics. However, it’s challenging to automatically detect and learn from extreme events and anomalies for large-scale datasets which often results in extra manual efforts. Here, we propose an anomaly-aware forecast framework that leverages the effects of anomalies to improve its prediction accuracy during the presence of extreme events. Our model has trained to extract anomalies automatically and incorporates them through an attention mechanism to increase the accuracy of forecasts during extreme events. Moreover, the framework employs a dynamic uncertainty optimization algorithm that reduces the uncertainty of forecasts in an online manner. The proposed framework demonstrated consistent superior accuracy with less uncertainty on three datasets with different varieties of anomalies over the current prediction models.