Functime

Functime is an AutoML tool specifically designed for large-scale business forecasting. It sets itself apart from other tools like Amazon Forecast and u8darts by offering lightning-fast performance, allowing users to forecast, backtest, and score 100,000 time series in under 10 seconds. Not only is it 100 times faster, but it also uses 20 times less memory. Functime seamlessly integrates external data, such as holiday, weather, and economic data, to support exogenous features and causal analysis. These features can be added through API integrations or user-provided datasets. The tool provides convenient utilities for adding exogenous features and interpreting forecasts, including feature importance plots, Shapley values, and sensitivity analysis. Functime also incorporates GPT-4-enabled trend-seasonality analysis, which offers a fully customizable and fine-tuned GPT-4 model to explain and justify each prediction. Visualizations created with ECharts and Plotly libraries can be easily shared with other data scientists and business stakeholders or embedded directly into products. The tool also excels in hyperparameter tuning and supports robust probabilistic forecasts using quantile regression and state-of-the-art conformal prediction techniques. Additionally, Functime offers options for handling datasets with messy or numerous zeros, such as zero-inflated and censored forecasts. Overall, Functime is a user-friendly and powerful API for AI/ML forecasting, providing a seamless experience for running and scaling time-series machine learning models in the cloud.