The time series forecasting: from the aspect of network

Forecasting can estimate the statement of events according to the historical data and it is considerably important in many disciplines. At present, time series models have been utilized to solve forecasting problems in various domains. In general, researchers use curve fitting and parameter estimation methods (moment estimation, maximum likelihood estimation and least square method) to forecast. In this paper, a new sight is given to the forecasting and a completely different method is proposed to forecast time series. Inspired by the visibility graph and link prediction, this letter converts time series into network and then finds the nodes which are mostly likelihood to link with the predicted node. Finally, the predicted value will be obtained according to the state of the link. The TAIEX data set is used in the case study to illustrate that the proposed method is effectiveness. Compared with ARIMA model, the proposed shows a good forecasting performance when there is a small amount of data.