auto_regressors: Automatic Detection of Outliers, Trends Breaks and Temporary...

In tsaux: Time Series Forecasting Auxiliary Functions

Automatic Detection of Outliers, Trends Breaks and Temporary Changes

Description

A wrapper function for function tso from the tsoutliers package. Takes as input a univariate xts object and returns a list with an xts object with any identified outliers, trend breaks and/or temporary changes to be used as regressors during estimation as well initial coefficients (see details).

Usage

auto_regressors(
  y,
  frequency = 1,
  lambda = NULL,
  forc_dates = NULL,
  sampling = NULL,
  h = 0,
  stlm_opts = list(etsmodel = "AAN"),
  auto_arima_opts = list(max.p = 1, max.q = 1, d = 1, allowdrift = FALSE),
  return_table = FALSE,
  method = c("sequential", "full"),
  ...
)

Arguments

y	a univariate xts object.
frequency	the frequency of the time series. If the frequency is 1 then seasonal estimation will be turned off. Will also accept multiple seasonal frequencies.
lambda	an optional Box Cox transformation parameter. The routines are then run on the transformed dataset.
forc_dates	an optional vector of Date to be used for indexing the series when h is not NULL. If this is not provided then the sampling frequency of the series will be estimated in order to generate this.
sampling	the sampling frequency the series. If h>0 and forc_dates is not provided, then this is required in order to generate future time indices (valid values are days, months, hours, mins, secs etc).
h	an optional value for the forecast horizon (if planning to also use for prediction).
stlm_opts	additional arguments to the stlm function.
auto_arima_opts	additional arguments to the auto.arima function in the tso routine.
return_table	whether to return a data.table instead with the anomalies detected rather than an xts matrix with the pre-processed and ready to use anomalies.
method	whether to apply a sequential identification of anomalies using STL decomposition in order to only pass the stationary residuals to the tso function, else to pass the series directly to the tso package.
...	any additional arguments passed to the tso functions (refer to the documentation of the tsoutliers package).

Details

For generating future values of the identified outliers, the filter function is used with additive outliers having a filter value of 0, trend changes a value of 1, and temporary changes have value between 0 and 1. For the sequential method, the routine first interpolates any missing values, followed by an optional Box Cox transformation, and then elimination (and identification) of any outliers during the first pass. The cleaned series is then run through an stl filter (if any frequency is greater than 1) in order to deseasonalize the data (with multiple seasonality supported), after which the deseasonalized series is passed to the tso function where any additive outliers (AO), temporary shifts (TC) or level shift (LS) are identified. Additive outliers from this stage are added to any identified outliers from the initial stage. For each regressor, initial parameter values are returned together with the regressor matrix which should be passed to the estimation routine. This is critically important since in the absence of good parameter scaling, initial values are key to good convergence. Care should be taken with regards to any automatic Box Cox parameter estimation. In the presence of large outliers or level shifts, this is likely to be badly estimated which is why we do not allow automatic calculation of this, but instead place the burden on the user to decide what is a reasonable value (if any). If a Box Cox transformation is used in the estimation routine, then it is important to use the same lambda parameter in this function in order to get sensible results. Again, avoid automatic Box Cox calculations throughout when you suspect significant contamination of the series by outliers and breaks. For the full method, the series is directly passed to the tso function of the tsoutliers package. Finally, it should be noted that this function is still experimental, and may change in the future.

Value

A list with an xts outlier matrix (if any where identified) as well as a vector of initial parameter for use in the initialization of the optimizer.

Author(s)

Alexios Galanos for this wrapper function.
Rob Hyndman for the forecast package.
Javier Lopez-de-Lacalle for the tsoutliers package.

Examples

library(xts)
set.seed(200)
y = cumprod(c(100,(1+rnorm(100,0.01, 0.04))))
y = xts(y, as.Date(1:101, origin = as.Date("2000-01-01")))
yclean = y
outlier1 = rep(0, 101)
outlier1[20] = 0.35
outlier2 = rep(0, 101)
outlier2[40] = 0.25
outlier2 = as.numeric(filter(outlier2, filter = 0.6, method = "recursive"))
y = y + y*xts(outlier1, index(y))
y = y + y*xts(outlier2, index(y))
# may need some tweaking of the tso options.
x = auto_regressors(y, frequency = 1, sampling = "days", h = 20,
check.rank = TRUE, discard.cval = 4)
head(x$xreg)
tail(x$xreg)
min(which(x$xreg[,1]==1))
min(which(x$xreg[,2]==1))
#plot(as.numeric(y), type = "l", ylab = "")
#lines(as.numeric(yclean) + (x$xreg %*% x$init)[1:101], col = 2)

tsaux documentation built on April 4, 2025, 3:08 a.m.