Applying support vector machines to predict building energy consumption in tropical region

We investigate practical selection of hyper-parameters for support vector machines (SVM) regression (that is, epsilon-insensitive zone and regularization parameter C). The proposed methodology advocates analytic parameter selection directly from the training data, rather than re-sampling approaches commonly used in SVM applications. In particular, we describe a new analytical prescription for setting the value of insensitive zone epsilon, as a function of training sample size. Good generalization performance of the proposed parameter selection is demonstrated empirically using several low- and high-dimensional regression problems. Further, we point out the importance of Vapnik's epsilon-insensitive loss for regression problems with finite samples. To this end, we compare generalization performance of SVM regression (using proposed selection of epsilon-values) with regression using 'least-modulus' loss (epsilon=0) and standard squared loss. These comparisons indicate superior generalization performance of SVM regression under sparse sample settings, for various types of additive noise.

A novel type of learning machine called support vector machine (SVM) has been receiving increasing interest in areas ranging from its original application in pattern recognition to other applications such as regression estimation due to its remarkable generalization performance. This paper deals with the application of SVM in financial time series forecasting. The feasibility of applying SVM in financial forecasting is first examined by comparing it with the multilayer back-propagation (BP) neural network and the regularized radial basis function (RBF) neural network. The variability in performance of SVM with respect to the free parameters is investigated experimentally. Adaptive parameters are then proposed by incorporating the nonstationarity of financial time series into SVM. Five real futures contracts collated from the Chicago Mercantile Market are used as the data sets. The simulation shows that among the three methods, SVM outperforms the BP neural network in financial forecasting, and there are comparable generalization performance between SVM and the regularized RBF neural network. Furthermore, the free parameters of SVM have a great effect on the generalization performance. SVM with adaptive parameters can both achieve higher generalization performance and use fewer support vectors than the standard SVM in financial forecasting.