ForecastTB—An R Package as a Test-Bench for Time Series Forecasting—Application of Wind Speed and Solar Radiation Modeling

Abstract

This paper introduces an R package ForecastTB that can be used to compare the accuracy of different forecasting methods as related to the characteristics of a time series dataset. The ForecastTB is a plug-and-play structured module, and several forecasting methods can be included with simple instructions. The proposed test-bench is not limited to the default forecasting and error metric functions, and users are able to append, remove, or choose the desired methods as per requirements. Besides, several plotting functions and statistical performance metrics are provided to visualize the comparative performance and accuracy of different forecasting methods. Furthermore, this paper presents real application examples with natural time series datasets (i.e., wind speed and solar radiation) to exhibit the features of the ForecastTB package to evaluate forecasting comparison analysis as affected by the characteristics of a dataset. Modeling results indicated the applicability and robustness of the proposed R package ForecastTB for time series forecasting.