Automatic Model Building in GEFCom 2017 Qualifying Match

The Tangent Works team participated in GEFCom 2017 to test its automatic model building strategy for time series known as Tangent Information Modeller (TIM). Model building using TIM combined with historical temperature shuffling resulted in winning the competition. This strategy involved one remaining degree of freedom, a decision on using a trend variable. This paper describes our modelling efforts in the competition, and furthermore outlines a fully automated scenario where the decision on using the trend variable is handled by TIM. The results show that such a setup would also win the competition.