A model updating strategy for predicting time series with seasonal patterns

Traditional methodologies for time series prediction take the series to be predicted and split it into training, validation, and test sets. The first one serves to construct forecasting models, the second set for model selection, and the third one is used to evaluate the final model. Different time series approaches such as ARIMA and exponential smoothing, as well as regression techniques such as neural networks and support vector regression, have been successfully used to develop forecasting models. A problem that has not yet received proper attention, however, is how to update such forecasting models when new data arrives, i.e. when a new event of the considered time series occurs.This paper presents a strategy to update support vector regression based forecasting models for time series with seasonal patterns. The basic idea of this updating strategy is to add the most recent data to the training set every time a predefined number of observations takes place. This way, information in new data is taken into account in model construction. The proposed strategy outperforms the respective static version in almost all time series studied in this work, considering three different error measures.