Abstract
Although the idea of information granulation has been shown to be a research craze in short-term time series forecasting, it is still urgent to develop a granular framework so that information granulation can characterize the trend distribution of data to the significant extent under a common concept of time. This article puts forward a novel granulation algorithm involving two-stage partitioning scheme so that information granule established there exhibits well-articulated semantics at the time level, while at the same time, it gives full consideration to the varying patterns of data. On this basis, a new association rule based on this type of information granules is presented. Unlike most fuzzy association rules, the proposed association rules can extract and derive the correlations between two collections of trend features corresponding to the past and future, which is in accord with human's reasoning. Keeping in mind that the prediction process should center on essential rules while freeing from the interference of irrelevant rules, which contributes to a reliable prediction result, thus, a rule selection algorithm is involved so as one makes sure the accuracy and interpretability of the forecasting results. The design of short-term forecasting model based on fuzzy inference system is implemented, where the concept of granulation eliminates the commonly used alternative, i.e., the recursive iterations of one-step prediction. Experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed model.