A Comparison of Automated Time Series Forecasting Tools for Smart Cities

Most smart city sensors generate time series records and forecasting such data can provide valuable insights for citizens and city managers. Within this context, the adoption of Automated Time Series Forecasting (AutoTSF) tools is a key issue, since it facilitates the design and deployment of multiple TSF models. In this work, we adapt and compare eight recent AutoTSF tools (Pmdarima, Prophet, Ludwig, DeepAR, TFT, FEDOT, AutoTs and Sktime) using nine freely available time series that can be related with the smart city concept (e.g., temperature, energy consumption, city traffic). An extensive experimentation was carried out by using a realistic rolling window with several training and testing iterations. Also, the AutoTSF tools were evaluated by considering both the predictive performances and required computational effort. Overall, the FEDOT tool presented the best overall performance.