What is Time-Series Data

Modeling time-series data with asynchronous, multi-cardinal, and uneven patterns presents several unique challenges that may impede convergence of supervised machine learning algorithms, or significantly increase resource requirements, thus rendering modeling efforts infeasible in resource-constrained environments. The authors propose two approaches to multi-class classification of asynchronous time-series data. In the first approach, they create a baseline by reducing the time-series data using a statistical approach and training a model based on gradient boosted trees. In the second approach, they implement a fully convolutional network (FCN) and train it on asynchronous data without any special feature engineering. Evaluation of results shows that FCN performs as well as the gradient boosting based on mean F1-score without computationally complex time-series feature engineering. This work has been applied in the prediction of customer attrition at a large retail automotive finance company.