Functime is an automated machine learning (AutoML) tool designed for modern-day business forecasting at scale. It allows users to forecast, backtest, and score 100,000 time series in under 10 seconds, which is 100x faster compared to other tools such as Amazon Forecast and u8darts. Functime is built from the ground up for speed and uses 20x less memory usage. Functime seamlessly integrates holiday, weather, economic, and other external data to support exogenous features and causal analysis, which can be added from API integrations or user-provided datasets. The tool offers out-of-the-box utilities for adding exogenous features and interpreting every forecast using feature importance plots, Shapley values, and sensitivity analysis. Functime also features GPT-4-enabled trend-seasonality analysis, which provides a fully customizable and fine-tuned GPT-4 model to describe and justify every prediction. Visualizations made with the ECharts and Plotly libraries can be shared instantly with other data scientists and business stakeholders or directly embedded into products. The tool provides blazing-fast hyperparameter tuning and supports embarrassingly-parallel and robust probabilistic forecasts using quantile regression and state-of-the-art conformal prediction techniques. Additionally, Functime offers zero-inflated and censored forecast options for datasets with messy or numerous zeros. Overall, Functime is a powerful and easy-to-use API for AI/ML forecasting that enables users to run and scale time-series machine learning models in the cloud with ease.
