Benchmarking Sensor-Fault Robustness in Forecasting

Alexander Windmann; Philipp Wittenberg; Gianluca Manca; Marcel Dix; Jens U. Brandt; Oliver Niggemann

cs.LGMay 11, 2026

Benchmarking Sensor-Fault Robustness in Forecasting

Authors: Alexander Windmann, Philipp Wittenberg, Gianluca Manca, Marcel Dix, Jens U. Brandt, Oliver Niggemann

Organizations: 1Helmut Schmidt University · 2Ruhr University Bochum · 3ABB Corporate Research · 4TH Köln · 5Leiden University

Abstract

Cyber-physical system (CPS) forecasting models depend on sensor streams with noisy, biased, missing, or temporally misaligned readings, yet standard forecasting evaluation often selects models by nominal error without showing whether they remain robust under such faults. We introduce SensorFault-Bench, a shared CPS-grounded sensor-fault stress-test protocol for evaluating forecasting architectures and robustness-improvement methods, and an operational taxonomy organizing the method comparison. Across four real-world datasets and eight scored scenarios governed by a standardized severity model, it reports worst-scenario degradation, clean mean squared error (MSE), and worst-scenario fault-time MSE, separating relative robustness from absolute error. A disjoint fault-transfer split lets explicit fault-training methods train on adjacent fault families while evaluation uses separate benchmark scenarios. Empirically, forecasting architectures favored by clean MSE can degrade sharply under faults, and clean-MSE rankings can disagree with worst-scenario fault-time error rankings. Chronos-2, the evaluated zero-shot foundation-model representative, matches or trails the last-value naive forecaster in clean MSE on the two single-target datasets and has the largest worst-scenario degradation on ETTh1 and Traffic, where all channels are forecast targets. For the evaluated robustness-improvement method set, paired deltas show selective degradation reductions: projected gradient descent adversarial training and randomized training lead where value faults dominate observed degradation, while fault augmentation leads where availability faults dominate. SensorFault-Bench provides open-source code, documented data access, and reproduction and extension guides, so new datasets, architectures, and robustness-improvement methods can be evaluated under the same CPS sensor-fault robustness protocol.

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