Functime

Functime is an automated machine learning (AutoML) tool designed specifically for business forecasting. It has the capability to forecast, backtest, and score 100,000 time series in under 10 seconds. It incorporates various types of data sources and uses advanced techniques such as quantile regression and conformal prediction for forecasting. Functime also offers GPT-4-enabled trend-seasonality analysis and powerful visualization capabilities using ECharts and Plotly libraries.

Functime's unique speed is due to its purpose-built design for fast execution and efficient memory usage. It can forecast, backtest, and score 100,000 time series in under 10 seconds, which is 100 times faster than other tools like Amazon Forecast and u8darts. Additionally, Functime uses 20 times less memory as compared to other solutions.

Functime integrates external data by supporting exogenous features and causal analysis. Users can add these features either from API integrations or from their own datasets. This feature allows for a more thorough and relevant analysis by taking into account external factors.

Functime allows the integration of various types of external data including holiday, weather, economic, and other relevant external data sources. This provides a more in-depth analysis that goes beyond analyzing numerical trends and includes factors that could have a causal impact.

Feature importance plots in Functime help in interpreting each forecast. The feature importance plot shows the contribution of each feature to the forecast. This aids in understanding which features are important and how they are contributing to the overall forecast.

Functime uses Shapley values and sensitivity analysis for a comprehensive interpretation of each forecast. Shapley values are used to distribute the value of the prediction among the contributing features, providing a clear picture of the impact of each feature on the predicted outcome. Sensitivity analysis, on the other hand, gives an idea of how susceptible the output is to changes in input.

Functime employs GPT-4-enabled trend-seasonality analysis. This is a fully customizable and fine-tuned GPT-4 model used to describe and justify predictions. This feature provides detailed, AI-generated descriptions of why the model made each prediction, adding a layer of interpretability to the model's results.

Functime offers sophisticated visualizations using the ECharts and Plotly libraries. These visualizations can be used to represent forecasts, feature importance, Shapley values, sensitivity analysis, and more, providing an easy way to understand the output and performance metrics.

Visualizations created with Functime can be shared instantly, making it very easy to share. This facilitates easy communication with other data scientists and business stakeholders. The visualizations can also be directly embedded into products.

Feature engineering in Functime is powered by the world’s fastest DataFrame library, Polars, lazy query optimization, and the Arrow ecosystem. This setup allows for extremely fast execution of feature engineering tasks.