Machine Learning vs Statistical Methods for Time Series Forecasting: Size Matters

Abstract

Time series forecasting is one of the most active research topics. Machine learning methods have been increasingly adopted to solve these predictive tasks. However, in a recent work, these were shown to systematically present a lower predictive performance relative to simple statistical methods. In this work, we counter these results. We show that these are only valid under an extremely low sample size. Using a learning curve method, our results suggest that machine learning methods improve their relative predictive performance as the sample size grows. The code to reproduce the experiments is available at https://github.com/vcerqueira/MLforForecasting.