timesift: Learn Predictive Representations of Time-Varying Data

Fits and compares representations of time-varying data against a prediction target. Given a table of targets and a table of time-stamped series belonging to them, it builds each candidate representation, from the record unreduced through a calendar grain such as a week or a month to a lookback anchored on each target, fits the requested learners on each, scores every candidate on one set of held-out folds, and stacks the out-of-fold predictions into an ensemble. Calendar-aware binning keeps a bin a real week or month rather than a fixed block of hours. Learners, response heads and metrics are registered rather than hard-coded, so adding one is a registration and not a fork of the fitting code. The penalised baseline is an elastic net fitted by cyclic coordinate descent along a warm-started path, following Friedman, Hastie and Tibshirani (2010) <doi:10.18637/jss.v033.i01>. The shipped default is presence-absence with a joint multi-label head scored by the true skill statistic of Allouche, Tsoar and Kadmon (2006) <doi:10.1111/j.1365-2664.2006.01214.x>, the setting used for species distribution modelling from microclimate loggers.

Version: 0.3.1
Depends: R (≥ 4.1)
Imports: grDevices, graphics, rlang, stats, tidyselect (≥ 1.2.0), tools, utils
LinkingTo: cpp11
Suggests: testthat (≥ 3.0.0), torch, glmnet, ranger, lme4, lmerTest, emmeans, knitr, rmarkdown, spelling, withr
Published: 2026-10-02
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.timesift (may not be active yet)
Author: Gilles Colling ORCID iD [aut, cre, cph]
Maintainer: Gilles Colling <gilles.colling051 at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/gcol33/timesift/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://gillescolling.com/timesift/, https://github.com/gcol33/timesift
NeedsCompilation: yes
Language: en-GB
Citation: timesift citation info
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: timesift results

Documentation:

Reference manual: timesift.html , timesift.pdf
Vignettes: Reproducing the Schrankogel grid (source, R code)
Choosing how a record is read (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: timesift_0.3.1.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

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