Hello! I am a Computer Science Student experimenting with the multi-step models on TensorFlow's "Time series forecasting" tutorial.
I am applying to the models the positional data I found for an Italian roe deer in the "EuroDeer: Roe deer in Italy in 2005-2008" data set on Movebank, and have used interpolation to fill in missing longitudinal, latitudinal, and altitudinal data. The goal is to predict the future position of a deer given past information of conditions and position.
The multi-step models found on the TensorFlow tutorial were made for input data with consistent time-intervals in-between them. However, the Italian roe deer dataset does not have consistent time spaces between data points. I have tried reducing the dataset to daily values, but I have yet to get the model working with daily data.
Is it possible to also use interpolation to create a new data set with consistent 4-hour intervals, or would there be too much error created from that much interpolation?
28 June 2024 6:35pm
The use of synthetic training data such as interpolated sequence values is common, but fraught with the issue of your synthetic signal generating features that are not true to real life.
Instead, you might think about about appending the values of two long-period sin waves per input element to the sequence going in to your first linear / fully-connected layer. The simplest thing that could possibly work would be to interpret minute of the day and day of the month as the values of your sin wave! (Or perhaps minute/hour if all training sequences are quite short.) Since you’re doing sequence prediction, you would add the appropriate values for each image(?) in the sequence being evaluated.
With that additional signal going in to the model in the early layers, the NN should have a good chance of learning that the differences in the modulating signal corresponds to distance in time.
This technigue was popularized by early Large Language Models to encode the distance between words. There’s been refinement (search “Rotary Encoding” for instance) but the basic idea of sin waves generalizes well.
Larry O'Brien