Uncertainty quantification of predictive models is crucial in decision-making problems. Conformal prediction is a general and theoretically sound answer. However, it requires exchangeable data, excluding time series. While recent works tackled this issue, we argue that Adaptive Conformal Inference (ACI, Gibbs & Cand{è}s, 2021), developed for distribution-shift time series, is a good procedure for time series with general dependency. We theoretically analyse the impact of the learning rate on its efficiency in the exchangeable and auto-regressive case. We propose a parameter-free method, AgACI, that adaptively builds upon ACI based on online expert aggregation. We lead extensive fair simulations against competing methods that advocate for ACI’s use in time series. We conduct a real case study: electricity price forecasting. The proposed aggregation algorithm provides efficient prediction intervals for day-ahead forecasting. All the code and data to reproduce the experiments are made available on GitHub.

We propose a contextual-bandit approach for demand side management by offering price incentives. More precisely, a target mean consumption is set at each round and the mean consumption is modeled as a complex function of the distribution of prices sent and of some contextual variables such as the temperature, weather, and so on. The performance of our strategies is measured in quadratic losses through a regret criterion. We offer $T^{2/3}$ upper bounds on this regret (up to poly-logarithmic terms)—and even faster rates under stronger assumptions—for strategies inspired by standard strategies for contextual bandits (like LinUCB, see Li et al., 2010). Simulations on a real data set gathered by UK Power Networks, in which price incentives were offered, show that our strategies are effective and may indeed manage demand response by suitably picking the price levels.

Motivated by the recovery and prediction of electricity consumption time series, we extend Nonnegative Matrix Factorization to take into account external features as side information. We consider general linear measurement settings, and propose a framework which models non-linear relationships between external features and the response variable. We extend previous theoretical results to obtain a sufficient condition on the identifiability of NMF with side information. Based on the classical Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares (HALS) algorithm, we propose a new algorithm (HALSX, or Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares with eXogeneous variables) which estimates NMF in this setting. The algorithm is validated on both simulated and real electricity consumption datasets as well as a recommendation system dataset, to show its performance in matrix recovery and prediction for new rows and columns.

Motivated by electricity consumption reconstitution, we propose a new matrix recovery method using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). The task tackled here is to reconstitute electricity consumption time series at a fine temporal scale from measures that are temporal aggregates of individual consumption. Contrary to existing NMF algorithms, the proposed method uses temporal aggregates as input data, instead of matrix entries. Furthermore, the proposed method is extended to take into account individual autocorrelation to provide better estimation, using a recent convex relaxation of quadratically constrained quadratic programs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world electricity consumption datasets illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper proposes an efficient online learning algorithm to track the smoothing functions of Additive Models. The key idea is to combine the linear representation of Additive Models with a Recursive Least Squares (RLS) filter. In order to quickly track changes in the model and put more weight on recent data, the RLS filter uses a forgetting factor which exponentially weights down observations by the order of their arrival. The tracking behaviour is further enhanced by using an adaptive forgetting factor which is updated based on the gradient of the a priori errors. Using results from Lyapunov stability theory, upper bounds for the learning rate are analyzed. The proposed algorithm is applied to 5 years of electricity load data provided by the French utility company Electricite de France (EDF). Compared to state-of-the-art methods, it achieves a superior performance in terms of model tracking and prediction accuracy.