Time series forecasting has become a very intensive field of research, which is even increasing in recent years. Deep neural networks have proved to be powerful and are achieving high accuracy in many application fields. For these reasons, they are one of the most widely used methods of machine learning to solve problems dealing with big data nowadays. In this work, the time series forecasting problem is initially formulated along with its mathematical fundamentals. Then, the most common deep learning architectures that are currently being successfully applied to predict time series are described, highlighting their advantages and limitations. Particular attention is given to feed forward networks, recurrent neural networks (including Elman, long-short term memory, gated recurrent units, and bidirectional networks), and convolutional neural networks. Practical aspects, such as the setting of values for hyperparameters and the choice of the most suitable frameworks, for the successful application of deep learning to time series are also provided and discussed. Several fruitful research fields in which the architectures analyzed have obtained a good performance are reviewed. As a result, research gaps have been identified in the literature for several domains of application, thus expecting to inspire new and better forms of knowledge.

The ability to predict short-term electric energy demand would provide several benefits, both at the economic and environmental level. For example, it would allow for an efficient use of resources in order to face the actual demand, reducing the costs associated to the production as well as the emission of CO 2 . To this aim, in this paper we propose a strategy based on ensemble learning in order to tackle the short-term load forecasting problem. In particular, our approach is based on a stacking ensemble learning scheme, where the predictions produced by three base learning methods are used by a top level method in order to produce final predictions. We tested the proposed scheme on a dataset reporting the energy consumption in Spain over more than nine years. The obtained experimental results show that an approach for short-term electricity consumption forecasting based on ensemble learning can help in combining predictions produced by weaker learning methods in order to obtain superior results. In particular, the system produces a lower error with respect to the existing state-of-the art techniques used on the same dataset. More importantly, this case study has shown that using an ensemble scheme can achieve very accurate predictions, and thus that it is a suitable approach for addressing the short-term load forecasting problem.

This study proposes a novel bioinspired metaheuristic simulating how the coronavirus spreads and infects healthy people. From a primary infected individual (patient zero), the coronavirus rapidly infects new victims, creating large populations of infected people who will either die or spread infection. Relevant terms such as reinfection probability, super-spreading rate, social distancing measures, or traveling rate are introduced into the model to simulate the coronavirus activity as accurately as possible. The infected population initially grows exponentially over time, but taking into consideration social isolation measures, the mortality rate, and number of recoveries, the infected population gradually decreases. The coronavirus optimization algorithm has two major advantages when compared with other similar strategies. First, the input parameters are already set according to the disease statistics, preventing researchers from initializing them with arbitrary values. Second, the approach has the ability to end after several iterations, without setting this value either. Furthermore, a parallel multivirus version is proposed, where several coronavirus strains evolve over time and explore wider search space areas in less iterations. Finally, the metaheuristic has been combined with deep learning models, to find optimal hyperparameters during the training phase. As application case, the problem of electricity load time series forecasting has been addressed, showing quite remarkable performance.

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