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How to deploy a TimeGEN-1 model with Azure AI Studio

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Important

Some of the features described in this article might only be available in preview. This preview is provided without a service-level agreement, and we don't recommend it for production workloads. Certain features might not be supported or might have constrained capabilities. For more information, see Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.

In this article, you learn how to use Azure AI Studio to deploy the TimeGEN-1 model as a serverless API with pay-as-you-go billing. You filter on the Nixtla collection to browse the TimeGEN-1 model in the Model Catalog.

The Nixtla TimeGEN-1 is a generative, pretrained forecasting and anomaly detection model for time series data. TimeGEN-1 can produce accurate forecasts for new time series without training, using only historical values and exogenous covariates as inputs.

Deploy TimeGEN-1 as a serverless API

Certain models in the model catalog can be deployed as a serverless API with pay-as-you-go billing. This kind of deployment provides a way to consume models as an API without hosting them on your subscription, while keeping the enterprise security and compliance that organizations need. This deployment option doesn't require quota from your subscription.

You can deploy TimeGEN-1 as a serverless API with pay-as-you-go billing. Nixtla offers TimeGEN-1 through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Nixtla can change or update the terms of use and pricing of this model.

Prerequisites

  • An Azure subscription with a valid payment method. Free or trial Azure subscriptions don't work. If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a paid Azure account to begin.

  • An AI Studio hub. The serverless API model deployment offering for TimeGEN-1 is only available with hubs created in these regions:

    • East US
    • East US 2
    • North Central US
    • South Central US
    • West US
    • West US 3
    • Sweden Central

    For a list of regions that are available for each of the models supporting serverless API endpoint deployments, see Region availability for models in serverless API endpoints.

  • An Azure AI Studio project.

  • Azure role-based access controls (Azure RBAC) are used to grant access to operations in Azure AI Studio. To perform the steps in this article, your user account must be assigned the Azure AI Developer role on the resource group. For more information on permissions, visit Role-based access control in Azure AI Studio.

Pricing information

Estimate the number of tokens needed

Before you create a deployment, it's useful to estimate the number of tokens that you plan to use and be billed for. One token corresponds to one data point in your input dataset or output dataset.

Suppose you have the following input time series dataset:

Unique_id Timestamp Target Variable Exogenous Variable 1 Exogenous Variable 2
BE 2016-10-22 00:00:00 70.00 49593.0 57253.0
BE 2016-10-22 01:00:00 37.10 46073.0 51887.0

To determine the number of tokens, multiply the number of rows (in this example, two) and the number of columns used for forecasting—not counting the unique_id and timestamp columns (in this example, three) to get a total of six tokens.

Given the following output dataset:

Unique_id Timestamp Forecasted Target Variable
BE 2016-10-22 02:00:00 46.57
BE 2016-10-22 03:00:00 48.57

You can also determine the number of tokens by counting the number of data points returned after data forecasting. In this example, the number of tokens is two.

Estimate the pricing

There are four pricing meters, as described in the following table:

Pricing Meter Description
paygo-inference-input-tokens Costs associated with the tokens used as input for inference when finetune_steps = 0
paygo-inference-output-tokens Costs associated with the tokens used as output for inference when finetune_steps = 0
paygo-finetuned-model-inference-input-tokens Costs associated with the tokens used as input for inference when finetune_steps > 0
paygo-finetuned-model-inference-output-tokens Costs associated with the tokens used as output for inference when finetune_steps > 0

Create a new deployment

These steps demonstrate the deployment of TimeGEN-1. To create a deployment:

  1. Sign in to Azure AI Studio.
  2. Select Model catalog from the left sidebar.
  3. Search for and select TimeGEN-1 to open its Details page.
  4. Select Deploy to open a serverless API deployment window for the model.
  5. Alternatively, you can initiate a deployment by starting from your project in AI Studio.
    1. From the left sidebar of your project, select Components > Deployments.
    2. Select + Create deployment.
    3. Search for and select TimeGEN-1. to open the Model's Details page.
    4. Select Confirm to open a serverless API deployment window for the model.
  6. Select the project in which you want to deploy your model. To deploy the TimeGEN-1 model, your project must be in one of the regions listed in the Prerequisites section.
  7. In the deployment wizard, select the link to Azure Marketplace Terms, to learn more about the terms of use.
  8. Select the Pricing and terms tab to learn about pricing for the selected model.
  9. Select the Subscribe and Deploy button. If this is your first time deploying the model in the project, you have to subscribe your project for the particular offering. This step requires that your account has the Azure AI Developer role permissions on the resource group, as listed in the prerequisites. Each project has its own subscription to the particular Azure Marketplace offering of the model, which allows you to control and monitor spending. Currently, you can have only one deployment for each model within a project.
  10. Once you subscribe the project for the particular Azure Marketplace offering, subsequent deployments of the same offering in the same project don't require subscribing again. If this scenario applies to you, there's a Continue to deploy option to select.
  11. Give the deployment a name. This name becomes part of the deployment API URL. This URL must be unique in each Azure region.
  12. Select Deploy. Wait until the deployment is ready and you're redirected to the Deployments page.
  13. Return to the Deployments page, select the deployment, and note the endpoint's Target URL and the Secret Key. For more information on using the APIs, see the reference section.
  14. You can always find the endpoint's details, URL, and access keys by navigating to your Project overview page. Then, from the left sidebar of your project, select Components > Deployments.

To learn about billing for the TimeGEN-1 model deployed as a serverless API with pay-as-you-go token-based billing, see Cost and quota considerations for the TimeGEN-1 family of models deployed as a service.

Consume the TimeGEN-1 model as a service

You can consume TimeGEN-1 models by using the forecast API.

  1. From your Project overview page, go to the left sidebar and select Components > Deployments.

  2. Find and select the deployment you created.

  3. Copy the Target URL and the Key value.

  4. Try the samples here:

Use Case Description Sample Notebook
Quick Start Forecast The Nixtla TimeGEN1 is a generative, pretrained forecasting model for time series data. TimeGEN1 can produce accurate forecasts for new time series without training, using only historical values as inputs. Quick Start Forecast
Fine-tuning Fine-tuning is a powerful process to utilize Time-GEN1 more effectively. Foundation models - for example, TimeGEN1 - are pretrained on vast amounts of data, to capture wide-ranging features and patterns. These models can then be specialized for specific contexts or domains. Fine-tuning refines the model parameters to forecast a new task, allowing it to tailor its vast pre-existing knowledge towards the requirements of the new data. In this way, fine-tuning serves as a crucial bridge, linking the broad TimeGEN1 capabilities to the specifics of your tasks. Concretely, the fine-tuning process involves performing some training iterations on your input data, to minimize the forecasting error. The forecasts are produced with the updated model. To control the number of iterations, use the finetune_steps argument of the forecast method. Fine-tuning
Anomaly Detection Anomaly detection in time series data is important across various industries - for example, finance and healthcare. It involves monitoring ordered data points to spot irregularities that might signal issues or threats. Organizations can then swiftly act to prevent, improve, or safeguard their operations. Anomaly Detection
Exogenous Variables Exogenous variables are external factors that can influence forecasts. These variables take on one of a limited, fixed number of possible values, and induce a grouping of your observations. For example, if you're forecasting daily product demand for a retailer, you could benefit from an event variable that may tell you what kind of event takes place on a given day, for example 'None', Sporting', or 'Cultural'. Or you might also include external factors such as weather. Exogenous Variables
Demand Forecasting Demand forecasting involves application of historical data and other analytical information, to build models that help predict future estimates of customer demand, for specific products, over a specific time period. It helps shape product road map, inventory production, and inventory allocation, among other things. Demand Forecasting

For more information about use of the APIs, visit the reference section.

Reference for TimeGEN-1 deployed as a serverless API

Forecast API

Use the method POST to send the request to the /forecast_multi_series route:

Request

POST /forecast_multi_series HTTP/1.1
Host: <DEPLOYMENT_URI>
Authorization: Bearer <TOKEN>
Content-type: application/json

Request schema

The Payload JSON formatted string contains these parameters:

Key Type Default Description
DataFrame (df) DataFrame No default. This value must be specified. The DataFrame on which the function operates. Expected to contain at least these columns:

time_col: Column name in df that contains the time indices of the time series. This column is typically a datetime column with regular intervals - for example, hourly, daily, monthly data points.

target_col: Column name in df that contains the target variable of the time series, in other words, the variable we wish to predict or analyze.

Additionally, you can pass multiple time series (stacked in the dataframe) considering another column:

id_col: Column name in df that identifies unique time series. Each unique value in this column corresponds to a unique time series.
Forecast Horizon (h) int No default. This value must be specified. Forecast horizon
Frequency (freq) str None Frequency of the data. By default, the frequency is inferred automatically. For more information, visit pandas available frequencies.
Identifying Column (id_col) str unique_id Column that identifies each series.
Time Column (time_col) str ds Column that identifies each timestep; its values can be timestamps or integers.
Target Column (target_col) str y Column that contains the target.
Exogenous DataFrame (X_df) DataFrame None DataFrame with [unique_id, ds] columns and the df future exogenous variables.
Prediction Intervals (level) List[Union[int, float]] None Confidence levels between 0 and 100 for prediction intervals.
Quantiles (quantiles) List[float] None List of quantiles to forecast between (0, 1). level and quantiles shouldn't be used simultaneously. The output dataframe has the quantile columns formatted as TimeGEN-q-(100 * q) for each q value. The term 100 * q represents percentiles, but we choose this notation to avoid the appearance of dots in column names.
Fine-tuning Steps (finetune_steps) int 0 Number of steps used to fine-tune learning TimeGEN-1 in the new data.
Fine-tuning Loss (finetune_loss) str default Loss function to use for fine-tuning. Options: mae, mse, rmse, mape, smape
Clean Exogenous First (clean_ex_first) bool True Clean exogenous signal before making forecasts using TimeGEN-1.
Validate API Key (validate_api_key) bool False If true, validates API key before sending requests.
Add History (add_history) bool False Return fitted values of the model.
Date Features (date_features) Union False Features computed from the dates. Can be pandas date attributes or functions that take the dates as input. If true, automatically adds the most used date features for the frequency of df.
One-Hot Encoding Date Features (date_features_to_one_hot) Union True Apply one-hot encoding to these date features. If date_features=True then all date features are one-hot encoded by default.
Model (model) str azureai azureai
Number of Partitions (num_partitions) int None Number of partitions to use. If none, the number of partitions matches the available parallel resources in distributed environments.

Example

payload = {
    "model": "azureai",
    "freq": "D",
    "fh": 7,
    "y": {
        "2015-12-02": 8.71177264560569,
        "2015-12-03": 8.05610965954506,
        "2015-12-04": 8.08147504013705,
        "2015-12-05": 7.45876269238096,
        "2015-12-06": 8.01400499477946,
        "2015-12-07": 8.49678638163858,
        "2015-12-08": 7.98104975966596,
        "2015-12-09": 7.77779262633883,
        "2015-12-10": 8.2602342916073,
        "2015-12-11": 7.86633892304654,
        "2015-12-12": 7.31055015853442,
        "2015-12-13": 7.71824095195932,
        "2015-12-14": 8.31947369244219,
        "2015-12-15": 8.23668532271246,
        "2015-12-16": 7.80751004221619,
        "2015-12-17": 7.59186171488993,
        "2015-12-18": 7.52886925664225,
        "2015-12-19": 7.17165682276851,
        "2015-12-20": 7.89133075766189,
        "2015-12-21": 8.36007143564403,
        "2015-12-22": 8.11042723757502,
        "2015-12-23": 7.77527584648686,
        "2015-12-24": 7.34729970074316,
        "2015-12-25": 7.30182234213793,
        "2015-12-26": 7.12044437239249,
        "2015-12-27": 8.87877607170755,
        "2015-12-28": 9.25061821847475,
        "2015-12-29": 9.24792513230345,
        "2015-12-30": 8.39140318535794,
        "2015-12-31": 8.00469951054955,
        "2016-01-01": 7.58933582317062,
        "2016-01-02": 7.82524529143177,
        "2016-01-03": 8.24931374626064,
        "2016-01-04": 9.29514097366865,
        "2016-01-05": 8.56826646160024,
        "2016-01-06": 8.35255436947459,
        "2016-01-07": 8.29579811063615,
        "2016-01-08": 8.29029259122431,
        "2016-01-09": 7.78572089653462,
        "2016-01-10": 8.28172399041139,
        "2016-01-11": 8.4707303170059,
        "2016-01-12": 8.13505390861157,
        "2016-01-13": 8.06714903991011
    },
    "clean_ex_first": True,
    "finetune_steps": 0,
    "finetune_loss": "default"
}

Response schema

The response is a data frame of type pandas.DataFrame that contains the TimeGEN-1 forecasts for point predictions and probabilistic predictions.

Example

This JSON sample is an example response:

{
  "status": 200,
  "data": {
    "timestamp": [
      "2016-01-14 00:00:00",
      "2016-01-15 00:00:00",
      "2016-01-16 00:00:00",
      "2016-01-17 00:00:00",
      "2016-01-18 00:00:00",
      "2016-01-19 00:00:00",
      "2016-01-20 00:00:00"
    ],
    "value": [
      7.960582256317139,
      7.7414960861206055,
      7.728490352630615,
      8.267574310302734,
      8.543140411376953,
      8.298713684082031,
      8.105557441711426
    ],
    "input_tokens": 43,
    "output_tokens": 7,
    "finetune_tokens": 0
  },
  "message": "success",
  "details": "request successful",
  "code": "B10",
  "support": "If you have questions or need support, please email ops@nixtla.io",
  "requestID": "2JHQL2LDUX"
}

Cost and quotas

Cost and quota considerations for TimeGEN-1 deployed as a serverless API

Nixtla offers TimeGEN-1 deployed as a serverless API through the Azure Marketplace. TimeGEN-1 is integrated with Azure AI Studio for use. You can find more information about Azure Marketplace pricing when you deploy the model.

Each time a project subscribes to a given offer from the Azure Marketplace, a new resource is created to track the costs associated with its consumption. The same resource is used to track costs associated with inference; however, multiple meters are available to track each scenario independently.

For more information about how to track costs, visit monitor costs for models offered throughout the Azure Marketplace.

Quota is managed per deployment. Each deployment has a rate limit of 200,000 tokens per minute and 1,000 API requests per minute. However, we currently limit one deployment per model per project. Contact Microsoft Azure Support if the current rate limits are insufficient for your scenarios.

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