Auto-Configured Networks for Multi-Scale Multi-Output Time-Series Forecasting
Authors: Yumeng Zha, Shengxiang Yang, Xianpeng Wang
Organizations: National Frontiers Science Center for Industrial Intelligence and Systems Optimization, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China · Innovative Artificial Intelligence Cluster, Digital Future Institute, De Montfort University, Leicester, U.K. · Key Laboratory of Data Analytics and Optimization for Smart Industry (Northeastern University), Ministry of Education, Shenyang, China
Industrial forecasting often involves multi-source asynchronous signals and multi-output targets, while deployment requires explicit trade-offs between prediction error and model complexity. Current practices typically fix alignment strategies or network designs, making it difficult to systematically co-design preprocessing, architecture, and hyperparameters in budget-limited training-based evaluations. To address this issue, we propose an auto-configuration framework that outputs a deployable Pareto set of forecasting models balancing error and complexity. At the model level, a Multi-Scale Bi-Branch Convolutional Neural Network (MS--BCNN) is developed, where short- and long-kernel branches capture local fluctuations and long-term trends, respectively, for multi-output regression. At the search level, we unify alignment operators, architectural choices, and training hyperparameters into a hierarchical-conditional mixed configuration space, and apply Player-based Hybrid Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (PHMOEA) to approximate the error--complexity Pareto frontier within a limited computational budget. Experiments on hierarchical synthetic benchmarks and a real-world sintering dataset demonstrate that our framework outperforms competitive baselines under the same budget and offers flexible deployment choices.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Evaluator-driven auto-configuration framework for multi-scale multi-output time-series forecasting. PHMOEA proposes a configuration x , and the evaluator decodes x to configure preprocessing, MS–BCNN, and training, returning F(x) for selection and iteration. Solid arrows denote data or prediction flows, and dashed arrows denote configuration flows.
Figure 2: IGD curves along evolution on two H-DTLZ benchmark problems.
Table 2: Overall forecasting performance on the real-world sintering dataset with randomly shuffled samples (mean ± std).
Figure 3: Error scatter plot on the real-world sintering task under the chronological evaluation setting.
Model
NMSE ↓
NMAE ↓
MAPE(%) ↓
MS-BCNN
4.446±2.193
1.682±0.490
3.02±0.66
OB-ISSID
119.7±101.7
8.003±3.659
13.57±7.50
Ventingformer
4.789±4.111
1.698±0.746
2.89±0.87
Transformer
7.581±8.678
2.180±1.304
3.43±0.76
LSTM
114.8±206.4
6.334±7.545
4.23±1.53
GRU-PLS
10.714±6.280
2.795±1.053
4.61±0.18
Table 3: Overall forecasting performance on the real-world sintering dataset under the chronological evaluation setting (mean ± std).
Figure 4: Ablation results of the proposed methods. Panel (a) reports IGD for PHMOEA, averaged over two synthetic benchmarks (H-DTLZ2 and H-DTLZ7), while panel (b) reports NMSE on the real-world sintering dataset for MS–BCNN. For both metrics, lower values indicate better performance.
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Variable
Name
Type
Range / Candidate Set
x1
Resampling operator R
Discrete
{ linear , decimate_repeat , hybrid , pool , conv_blurpool , fir_lowpass }
x2
Pooling type (active if x1=pool )
Conditional Discrete
{ avg , max , median , weighted }
x3
Aligned length Lp
Discrete
{8, 12, 24, 36, 48}
x4
Batch size
Discrete
{16, 32, 64, 128}
x5
Normalization layer
Discrete
{ BatchNorm , LayerNorm , InstanceNorm }
x6
Projection channels C0
Discrete
{8, 16, 32, 64}
Appendix
Table 4: Decision variables in PHMOEA.
Category
Variables / Targets
Raw-material composition and blending
Mixed-material moisture, temperature, and granularity; fuel granularity; coarse fraction ratio (particle size >5 mm); ore-type proportions in the blend (six ore types); second-mixing additions (e.g., quicklime, return fines, coke breeze); planned blending ratios; planned basicity; raw-material price indicators (five series).
Process and thermal
Temperatures (ignition, exhaust gas, BTP); pressures (furnace negative pressure, main-line negative pressure, gas pressure, air pressure); flows (coal-gas flow, air flow); ore-bin scale flow rates (six bins).
Equipment state and environment
Material bed thickness; plate-belt speed; sintering machine speed; finished-product weighing; production output.
Output targets
TFe; FeO; SiO 2 ; CaO; Basicity.
Appendix
Table 5: Input variables and output targets in the sintering dataset (grouped by category).
Benchmark
Method
IGD ↓
HV ↑
H-DTLZ2
PHMOEA
0.0051725 ± 0.00008
0.4188035 ± 0.00024
MOEA/D
0.0043681 ± 0.00011
0.4192696 ± 0.00041
NSGA-II
0.0049416 ± 0.00038
0.4194225 ± 0.00062
NSGA-III
0.0041721 ± 0.00002
0.4197837 ± 0.00015
SMSEMOA
0.0051574 ± 0.00012
0.4208402 ± 0.00004
H-DTLZ7
PHMOEA
0.0033302 ± 0.00013
0.5566254 ± 0.00001
Appendix
Table 6: Per-benchmark evolutionary results on H-DTLZ2/7 at the final generation ( g=100 ). Best IGD (lower) and best HV (higher) per benchmark are highlighted in gray. Values are reported with 7 decimal places.
Figure 5: Comparison of Pareto fronts achieved by different evolutionary algorithms on the real-world sintering task in the MSE–parameter-count objective space.
Model
Target
MSE / NMSE
MAE / NMAE
MAPE (%)
MS-BCNN
TFe
0.066887±0.004481
0.199272±0.006370
0.358438±0.011667
FeO
0.130500±0.005977
0.248728±0.007786
2.762939±0.082877
SiO 2
0.004147±0.000860
0.047211±0.003289
0.834882±0.055914
CaO
0.034386±0.002732
0.137910±0.004608
1.140071±0.037974
Basicity
0.000561±0.000020
0.017901±0.000419
0.840955±0.019404
Overall
0.267880±0.217387
0.347816±0.138165
1.187457±0.041567
Appendix
Table 7: Per-target forecasting performance on five sintering targets under the shuffled (approximately i.i.d.) evaluation setting (mean ± std). For each target and metric, the best result is highlighted in gray.
Figure 6: Qualitative comparison of ground-truth and predicted trajectories for five quality targets under the shuffled (approximately i.i.d.) evaluation setting. Each panel shows the test-set predictions of one model (TFe, FeO, SiO 2 , CaO, and Basicity).
Model
Target
MSE / NMSE
MAE / NMAE
MAPE (%)
MS-BCNN
TFe
0.387834±0.141648
0.529125±0.106408
0.939281±0.188755
FeO
0.205710±0.046634
0.344918±0.047771
3.767097±0.507709
SiO 2
0.092268±0.037270
0.256975±0.064096
4.688675±1.153858
CaO
0.340601±0.136297
0.479478±0.110109
4.048819±0.919742
Basicity
0.001920±0.001217
0.035376±0.011207
1.639518±0.517844
Overall
4.445824±2.193273
1.682359±0.490118
3.016678±0.657582
Appendix
Table 8: Per-target forecasting performance on five sintering targets under the chronological (non-shuffled) evaluation setting (mean ± std). For each target and metric, the best result is highlighted in gray.
Figure 7: Qualitative comparison of ground-truth and predicted trajectories for five quality targets under the chronological (non-shuffled) evaluation setting. Each panel shows the test-set predictions of one model (TFe, FeO, SiO 2 , CaO, and Basicity).
Benchmark
Variant
IGD ↓
HV ↑
H-DTLZ2
Full (PHMOEA)
0.0051723 ± 0.00008
0.4188054 ± 0.00024
Without De-duplication
0.0054982 ± 0.00017
0.41825782 ± 0.00029
Without Elitism
0.0088575 ± 0.00190
0.4135749 ± 0.00629
H-DTLZ7
Full (PHMOEA)
0.0033303 ± 0.00013
0.5566297 ± 0.00001
Without De-duplication
0.0033351 ± 0.00016
0.5466567 ± 0.00002
Without Elitism
0.0102604 ± 0.00013
0.54902670 ± 0.00001
Appendix
Table 9: PHMOEA ablation on H-DTLZ2 and H-DTLZ7 (mean ± std across random seeds).
Figure 8: IGD trajectories over generations for PHMOEA ablations on synthetic benchmarks.
Variant
Target
MSE / NMSE ↓
MAE / NMAE ↓
MAPE(%) ↓
Full (MS-BCNN)
TFe
0.387834±0.141648
0.529125±0.106408
0.939281±0.188755
FeO
0.205710±0.046634
0.344918±0.047771
3.767097±0.507709
SiO 2
0.092268±0.037270
0.256975±0.064096
4.688675±1.153858
CaO
0.340601±0.136297
0.479478±0.110109
4.048819±0.919742
Basicity
0.001920±0.001217
0.035376±0.011207
1.639518±0.517844
Overall
4.445824±2.193273
1.682359±0.490118
3.016678±0.657582
Appendix
Table 10: Per-target ablation results of MS–BCNN on the real-world sintering task under the chronological (non-shuffled) evaluation setting (mean ± std across 5 random seeds).
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IDSIA USI-SUPSI, Universit`a della Svizzera italiana · Politecnico di Milano · EPFL
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Department, State Grid Hunan Electric Power Company Limited Research Institute & Hunan Province Engineering Technology Research Center of Electric Power Multimodal Perception and Edge Intelligence, Changsha, Hunan, China. · College of Computer Science, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan, China.
Multi-scale modeling has emerged as an effective design principle for time-series forecasting by capturing temporal dynamics at multiple resolutions. As no principled foundation has been established in the literature, we unify existing scaling methods into a scaling operator family, revealing a fundamental limitation of existing approaches: reliance on fixed and discrete scaling. To address this limitation, we propose SiGMA (Single Generalized Multi-scale Architecture), which enables distance-aware scaling via the learnable discrete Gaussian (LDG) kernel grounded in scale-space theory. We evaluate SiGMA comprehensively on long- and short-term forecasting benchmarks against state-of-the-art multi-scale baselines. SiGMA outperforms all competitors on both tasks, especially achieving the best performance in 13 out of 16 long-term evaluation settings. Beyond accuracy, SiGMA significantly improves training speed by up to 5.3 times and reduces memory consumption by up to 3.8 times over the strongest competitors. Code is available at https://github.com/cheonwoolee/SiGMA.
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