Traditional recurrent neural networks operate as passive observers of data, unable to modify the information they learn from despite errors that may arise from suboptimal input representations. We introduce Read & Write LSTM (read-write LSTM), a new variant within the family of read & write machine learning (RW-ML) architectures that address this fundamental limitation by integrating input modification directly into the backpropagation process. Read-write LSTM establishes a dynamic feedback loop where input representations evolve alongside model weights through gradient transformation mechanisms. Our approach introduces a principled gradient scaling framework with an adaptive correction rate that carefully controls the extent of data modification, preserving data integrity while enhancing representational power. We comprehensively evaluate read-write LSTM against traditional LSTMs and state-of-the-art transformer models on the M4 competition and Numenta Anomaly Benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant improvements in forecasting accuracy. Notably, read-write LSTM consistently out-performs standard LSTM models in over 70% of time series with complex patterns and achieves superior performance on 55% of anomaly-rich datasets. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, we establish both the theoretical foundations and practical benefits of integrating data modification with neural computation, paving the way for a new generation of adaptive learning systems that actively reshape their inputs rather than merely adapting to them.

Traffic forecasting problems involve jointly modeling the non-linear spatio-temporal dependencies at different scales. While graph neural network models have been effectively used to capture the non-linear spatial dependencies, capturing the dynamic spatial dependencies between the locations remains a major challenge. The errors in capturing such dependencies propagate in modeling the temporal dependencies between the locations, thereby severely affecting the performance of long-term predictions. While transformer-based mechanisms have been recently proposed for capturing the dynamic spatial dependencies, these methods are susceptible to fluctuations in data brought on by unforeseen events like traffic congestion and accidents. To mitigate these issues we propose an improvised spatio-temporal parallel transformer (STPT) based model for traffic prediction that uses multiple adjacency graphs passed through a pair of coupled graph transformer-convolution network units, operating in parallel, to generate more noise-resilient embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments on 4 real-world traffic datasets and compare the performance of STPT with several state-of-the-art baselines, in terms of measures like RMSE, MAE, and MAPE. We find that using STPT improves the performance by around \(10-34\%\) as compared to the baselines. We also investigate the applicability of the model on other spatio-temporal data in other domains. We use a Covid-19 dataset to predict the number of future occurrences in different regions from a given set of historical occurrences. The results demonstrate the superiority of our model for such datasets.

In different application areas, the prediction of values that are hierarchically related is required. As an example, consider predicting the revenue per month and per year of a company where the prediction of the year should be equal to the sum of the predictions of the months of that year. The idea of reconciliation of prediction on grouped time-series has been previously proposed to provide optimal forecasts based on such data. This method in effect, models the time-series collectively rather than providing a separate model for time-series at each level. While originally, the idea of reconciliation is applicable on data of time-series nature, it is not clear if such an approach can also be applicable to regression settings where multi-attribute data is available. In this paper, we address such a problem by proposing Reconciliation for Regression (R4R), a two-step approach for prediction and reconciliation. In order to evaluate this method, we test its applicability in the context of Travel Time Prediction (TTP) of bus trips where two levels of values need to be calculated: (i) travel times of the links between consecutive bus-stops; and (ii) total trip travel time. The results show that R4R can improve the overall results in terms of both link TTP performance and reconciliation between the sum of the link TTPs and the total trip travel time. We compare the results acquired when using group-based reconciliation methods and show that the proposed reconciliation approach in a regression setting can provide better results in some cases. This method can be generalized to other domains as well.

Labelled football (soccer) data is hard to acquire and it usually needs humans to annotate the match events. This process makes it more expensive to be obtained by smaller clubs. UnFOOT (Unsupervised Football Analytics Tool) combines data mining techniques and basic statistics to measure the performance of players and teams from positional data. The capabilities of the tool involve preprocessing the match data, extraction of features, visualization of player and team performance. It also has built-in data mining techniques, such as association rule mining and subgroup discovery.