The L-Co-R Co-evolutionary Algorithm - A Comparative Analysis in Medium-term Time-series Forecasting Problems

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study in which the effectiveness of the L-Co-R method is tested. L-Co-R is a co-evolutionary algorithm to time series forecasting that evolves, on one hand, RBFNs building an appropriate architecture of net, and on the other hand, sets of time lags that represents the time series in order to perform the forecasting using, at the same time, its own forecasted values. This coevolutive approach makes possible to divide the main problem into two subproblems where every individual of one population cooperates with the individuals of the other. The goal of this work is to analyze the results obtained by L-Co-R comparing with other methods from the time series forecasting field. For that, 20 time series and 5 different methods found in the literature have been selected, and 3 distinct quality measures have been used to show the results. Finally, a statistical study confirms the good results of L-Co-R in most cases.