In this blog post, you will learn how to easily build forecasting solutions without having to write extensive machine learning code, making the AI development process faster and more accessible for developers.

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You will use Nixtla’s StatsForecast engine integrated into the familiar developer environment by MindsDB - a powerful AI “middleware” platform that makes it easier than ever for #developers to build AI-powered applications.

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The advantages brought to time series forecasting by the StatsForecast engine integration with MindsDB include fast and accurate implementations of models, probabilistic forecasting and confidence intervals, support for exogenous variables and static covariates, anomaly detection, and more.

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Read along to follow a tutorial on forecasting monthly expenditures with code examples and demo data.

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Nixtla’s StatsForecast Integration with MindsDB

Nixtla is an open-source time-series ecosystem that offers model libraries for time series forecasting. And StatsForecast is one of the libraries providing statistical and econometric models.

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StatsForecast is optimized for high performance and scalability and uses classical methods such as ARIMA, rather than deep learning. Models train very quickly and generalize well, so are unlikely to overfit. They also perform well on short time series, where deep learning models may be more likely to overfit. We’ll go through an example to predict monthly expenditures of various categories for the next quarter.

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Let’s Set up the MindsDB

One way is to sign up for an account at MindsDB Cloud. It is a convenient option as it doesn’t require any installation procedures. You can find the details here.

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Alternatively, visit our docs and follow the instructions to manually set up a local instance of MindsDB via Docker or pip. You can also set up MindsDB on AWS following this instruction set.

Tutorial on How to Predict Monthly Expenditures

Connecting the Data

In this tutorial, we create a model to predict expenditures based on historical data using the StatsForecast engine.

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Before we start, visit our docs on how to connect Mongo Compass and Mongo Shell to MindsDB.

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We use a collection from our Mongo public demo database, so let’s start by connecting MindsDB to it from Mongo Compass or Mongo Shell:

> use mindsdb
> db.databases.insertOne({
        'name': 'mongo_demo_db',
        'engine': 'mongodb',
        'connection_args': {
            "host": "mongodb+srv://user:MindsDBUser123!@demo-data-mdb.trzfwvb.mongodb.net/",
            "database": "public"
        }
   })

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Now that we’ve connected our database to MindsDB, let’s query the data to be used in the example.

> use mongo_demo_db
> db.historical_expenditures.find({}).limit(3)

Here is the output:

{
  _id: '63fd2388bee7187f230f56fc',
  month: '1982-04-01',
  category: 'food',
  expenditure: '1162.6'
}
{
  _id: '63fd2388bee7187f230f56fd',
  month: '1982-05-01',
  category: 'food',
  expenditure: '1150.9'
}
{
  _id: '63fd2388bee7187f230f56fe',
  month: '1982-06-01',
  category: 'food',
  expenditure: '1160'
}

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The _{historical_expenditures} collection stores monthly expenditure data for various categories, such as _food, _clothing, _industry, and more.

Creating an ML Engine

Before we can create a model, we should create a StatsForecast ML engine.

> use mindsdb
> db.ml_engines.insertOne({'name': "statsforecast", "handler": "statsforecast"})

We can list all ML engines with this command:

> db.ml_engines.find()

Please make sure that the StatsForecast engine exists.

Creating a Model

Let's create a model to predict the expenditures:

> use mindsdb
> db.predictors.insertOne({
       name: 'quarterly_expenditure_forecaster',
       predict: 'expenditure',
       connection: 'mongo_demo_db',
       select_data_query: 'db.historical_expenditures.find({})',
       training_options: {
          timeseries_settings: {                
              order_by: ['month'],               
              group_by: ['category'],
              horizon: 3           
          },
          engine: 'statsforecast'
      }  
  })

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In practice, the _insertOne method triggers MindsDB to generate an AI collection called _{quarterly_expenditure_forecaster} that uses the StatsForecast integration to predict a field named _expenditure. The model lives inside the default _mindsdb project. In MindsDB, projects are a natural way to keep artifacts, such as models or views, separate according to what predictive task they solve. You can learn more about MindsDB projects here.

While creating time series forecasting models, we define the following parameters under the _{timeseries_settings} clause:

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• The _{order_by} clause specifies a field used to sort data. Here we use the _month field to order the expenditures data.

• The _{group_by} clause defines a field used to divide data into groups. The model makes independent predictions for each partition of data. Here we use the _category field to group the expenditures data.

• The _horizon clause specifies how many records are to be predicted. Here we define _{horizon: 3}. It is equivalent to predicting expenditures for the next quarter.

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Please note that the _window clause is not required because StatsForecast automatically calculates the best window as part of hyperparameter tuning.

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The _engine parameter in the _{training_options} clause specifies the ML engine used to make predictions.

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Alternatively, if your data has a hierarchical structure, you may use hierarchical reconciliation to improve prediction accuracy. To do so, the below _insertOne method uses Nixtla’s HierarchicalForecast package.

> use mindsdb
> db.predictors.insertOne({
       name: 'quarterly_expenditure_forecaster',
       predict: 'expenditure',
       connection: 'mongo_demo_db',
       select_data_query: 'db.historical_expenditures.find({})',
       training_options: {
          timeseries_settings: {                
              order_by: ['month'],               
              group_by: ['category'],
              horizon: 3           
          },
          engine: 'statsforecast',
          hierarchy: ['category']
      }  
  })

Here we use the _hierarchy parameter in the _{training_options} clause to define the column that categorizes the data.

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We can check the training status with the following query:

> db.getCollection('models').find({
      name: 'quarterly_expenditure_forecaster'
  })

One of the pros of using the StatsForecast engine is that it is fast - it doesn’t take long until the model completes the training process.

Querying for Predictions

Once the model status is _complete, the behavior is the same as with any other AI collection – you can query for batch predictions by joining it with a data collection:

> db.quarterly_expenditure_forecaster.find({
      collection: 'mongo_demo_db.historical_expenditures', 
      query:  { 
          "$where": "this.month > latest and this.category = 'food'" 
      }
  }).limit(3)

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Here is the output data:

{
  _id: '63fd2388bee7187f230f58a5',
  month: 2017-10-01T00:00:00.000Z,
  category: 'food',
  expenditure: 10256.251953125
}
{
  _id: '63fd2388bee7187f230f58a4',
  month: 2017-11-01T00:00:00.000Z,
  category: 'food',
  expenditure: 10182.58984375
}
{
  _id: '63fd2388bee7187f230f58a3',
  month: 2017-12-01T00:00:00.000Z,
  category: 'food',
  expenditure: 10316.259765625
}

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The _{historical_expenditures} collection is used to make batch predictions. Upon joining the _{quarterly_expenditure_forecaster} model with the _{historical_expenditures} collection, we get predictions for the next quarter as defined by the _{horizon: 3} clause.

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Please note that the output month column contains both the date and timestamp. This format is used by default, as the timestamp is required when dealing with the hourly frequency of data.

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MindsDB provides the _latest keyword that marks the latest training data point. In the _WHERE clause, we specify the _{month > latest} condition to ensure the predictions are made for data after the latest training data point.

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Let’s consider our _{quarterly_expenditure_forecaster} model. We train the model using data until the third quarter of 2017, and the predictions come for the fourth quarter of 2017 (as defined by _{horizon: 3}).

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Let’s look at a graph that visualizes the historical and predicted data.

Leverage Timeseries Forecasting Capabilities with MindsDB

By integrating databases and Nixtla’s StatsForecast engine using MindsDB, developers can easily forecast future events based on historical data.

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The StatsForecast engine offers numerous time series forecasting models optimized for high performance and scalability. Nixtla developed a library of models that can efficiently fit millions of time series.

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Features provided by Nixtla’s StatsForecast engine include the implementation of models, probabilistic forecasting and confidence intervals, support for exogenous variables and static covariates, and anomaly detection. If you have technical questions regarding model behavior, the best resource is Nixtla’s community Slack.

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MindsDB is now the fastest-growing open-source applied machine-learning platform in the world. Its community continues to contribute to hundreds of data-source and ML-framework integrations. Stay tuned for the upcoming features - including more control over the interface parameters and fine-tuning models directly from MindsDB!

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Experiment with Nixtla’s StatsForecast models within MindsDB and unlock the ML capability over your data in minutes. Remember to sign-up for a free demo account and follow the tutorials, perhaps this time using your data.

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Finally, if MindsDB's vision to democratize ML sounds exciting, head to our community Slack, where you can get help and find people to chat about using other available data sources, ML frameworks, or writing a handler to bring your own!

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Have fun!

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