Bad results when adding date encoder

[rhyolight]

@helena_Thielen

How can I know when to apply a datetime encoder and when not? My intuition says: I should use it…

If your intuition says you should use it, I think you should use it.

@helena_Thielen

(I don’t know what the (21, 1) means here, because in the docs, there is just a single value for width mentioned, but this is copied form my model_params.
[ Question 2: What means the tuple here??]

Yeah, that looks strange. Change it to simply 21. This means you’ll have a 42 bit output. (I assume the 2nd element is ignored. )

@helena_Thielen

I don’t think that an radius of 4.5 hours

That makes sense to me, the default is 4 hours. So 1PM and 3PM would have some overlap, but 1PM and 5PM would have none. This seems about to be right fuzziness for a “time of day” to me.

See also [8] in the NuPIC Walkthrough Jupyter Notebook. If you run this locally, you can create a DateEncoder with different params and easily see the type of encodings it creates.

@helena_Thielen

Question 3 : is this the reason for worse result even with no perfectly repeating patterns?
Do my thoughts make sense?

The repeating patterns problem is one of the reasons NuPIC doesn’t make good predictions. It is more useful as an anomaly detection system.