DrafTS: Time-Aware Decomposition with Residual Correction for Time Series Modeling
Organizations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China · Abel AI Lab, USA · Squirrel Ai Learning, USA
Abstract
Real-world time series contain evolving underlying dynamics with irregular variations that lack stable temporal patterns and are often referred to as noise. Existing methods address this mixture by filtering frequencies or suppressing noisy observations. They either miss temporal evolution or risk suppressing useful dynamics. We propose DrafTS, a model-agnostic framework that aims to reduce noise while preserving evolving dynamics through time-aware Decomposition with ResiduAl correction For Time Series. DrafTS uses features derived from instantaneous amplitude and frequency to guide decomposition into a primary component intended to capture underlying dynamics. A task-specific backbone models the primary component, while a lightweight correction module uses residual information to correct the backbone output. Across four time series modeling tasks, DrafTS improves six diverse backbones, demonstrating its effectiveness. Code is at https://github.com/Autumn61q/DrafTS
Figures & tables
| Tasks | Datasets | Metrics | Series Length |
| Forecasting | Long-term: ETTh1, ETTm1, Weather, Electricity, ILI, ECG, Laser, Noisy Lorenz63 (SNR={3,5,7}) | MSE, MAE | |
| Short-term: M4 (6 subsets) | sMAPE, MASE, OWA | ||
| Classification | UEA (10 subsets) | Accuracy | |
| Anomaly Detection | SMD, MSL, SMAP, SWaT, PSM | Precision, Recall, F1-Score | 100 |
| Dataset | Metric | Crossformer ( 2023 ) | PatchTST ( 2023 ) | iTransformer ( 2023 ) | TimeMixer ( 2024a ) | TimeFilter ( 2025 ) | L-Drive ( 2026 ) | ||||||
| Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | ||
| ETTh1 | MSE | 0.449 | 0.443 ( 1.34%) | 0.459 | 0.457 ( 0.44%) | 0.448 | 0.440 ( 1.79%) | 0.458 | 0.453 ( 1.09%) | 0.488 | 0.475 ( 2.66%) | 0.472 | 0.465 ( 1.48%) |
| MAE | 0.445 | 0.441 ( 0.90%) | 0.432 | 0.431 ( 0.23%) | 0.431 | 0.431 ( 0.00%) | 0.429 | 0.428 ( 0.23%) | 0.457 | 0.453 ( 0.88%) | 0.447 | 0.443 ( 0.89%) | |
| ETTm1 | MSE | 0.413 | 0.401 ( 2.91%) | 0.396 | 0.392 ( 1.01%) | 0.400 | 0.394 ( 1.50%) | 0.393 | 0.385 ( 2.04%) | 0.385 | 0.386 (-0.26%) | 0.383 | 0.376 ( 1.83%) |
| MAE | 0.404 | 0.400 ( 0.99%) | 0.387 | 0.386 ( 0.26%) | 0.390 | 0.389 ( 0.26%) | 0.385 | 0.383 ( 0.52%) | 0.385 | 0.386 (-0.26%) | 0.383 | 0.382 ( 0.26%) | |
| Weather | MSE | 0.241 | 0.239 ( 0.83%) | 0.251 | 0.247 ( 1.59%) | 0.268 | 0.263 ( 1.87%) | 0.283 | 0.241 ( 14.84%) | 0.238 | 0.235 ( 1.26%) | 0.237 | 0.234 ( 1.27%) |
| Residual Module | MSE | MAE | Trainable | Total |
| No Correction | 0.815 | 0.655 | – | – |
| RC (ours) | 0.805 (0.001) | 0.653 ( 0.001) | 12.48K | 16.77K |
| Flatten Linear | 0.815( 0.001) | 0.661( 0.001) | 55.49K | 55.49K |
| Trainable RC | 0.809 (0.009) | 0.656 (0.006) | 16.77K | 16.77K |
| Method | AUC | Minimum Error | ||
| MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | |
| Ours ( DrafTS ) | 0.340 | 0.309 | 0.319 (5.49%) | 0.291 (2.26%) |
| FFT-high | 0.352 | 0.321 | 0.322 (1.28%) | 0.293 (1.28%) |
| FFT-low | 0.403 | 0.358 | 0.347 (1.38%) | 0.310 (1.38%) |
| DCT-high | 0.362 | 0.331 | 0.344 (4.01%) | 0.310 (4.01%) |
| STFT-high | 0.363 | 0.331 | 0.333 (6.30%) | 0.301 (6.30%) |
| Dataset | Raw | Raw + RC | Analyt. + [Amp., Freq., ] | Analyt. + | Analyt. + [Amp., Freq., ] + RC | DrafTS (Ours) |
| SNR=3 | 0.699 / 0.505 | 0.713 / 0.527 | 0.713 / 0.522 | 0.716 / 0.520 | 0.702 / 0.511 | 0.674 / 0.489 |
| SNR=5 | 0.648 / 0.513 | 0.636 / 0.502 | 0.663 / 0.522 | 0.667 / 0.526 | 0.602 / 0.474 | 0.595 / 0.470 |
| SNR=7 | 0.604 / 0.509 | 0.561 / 0.470 | 0.600 / 0.500 | 0.548 / 0.464 | 0.529 / 0.445 | 0.522 / 0.438 |
| Method | Params. | Peak Alloc. (MiB) | Train Iters. | MSE | MAE | Model FLOPs/Sample |
| Raw | 4,836,628 | 197.24 | 570 | 3.848 | 1.055 | 0.21179 GFLOPs |
| + DrafTS | 4,847,553 | 198.54 | 440 | 2.785 | 0.978 | 0.21204 GFLOPs |
| Change vs. Raw |
| Dataset | Residual Magnitude (%) | Residual Variance | Temporal-Variation Alignment |
| ETTm1 | 1.74 | 0.292 | 0.240 |
| ILI | 3.70 | 0.370 | 0.484 |
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Dataset | Dim | Input Length | Prediction Length | Dataset Size | Frequency / Information |
| ETTh1 | 7 | 96 | Hourly / Temperature | ||
| ETTm1 | 7 | 96 | 15 min / Temperature | ||
| Electricity | 321 | 96 | Hourly / Electricity | ||
| Weather | 21 | 96 | 10 min / Meteorology | ||
| ILI | 7 | 24 | Weekly / Health | ||
| ECG | 1 | 360 | 500 Hz / Health |
| Dataset | Dim | Input Length | Prediction Length | Official Series (Train, Test) | Frequency / Information |
| M4-Yearly | 1 | 12 | 6 | Yearly / Demographic | |
| M4-Quarterly | 1 | 16 | 8 | Quarterly / Finance | |
| M4-Monthly | 1 | 36 | 18 | Monthly / Industry | |
| M4-Weekly | 1 | 26 | 13 | Weekly / Macro | |
| M4-Daily | 1 | 28 | 14 | Daily / Micro | |
| M4-Hourly | 1 | 96 | 48 | Hourly / Other |
| Dataset | Samples (Train, Test) | Variables | Series Length |
| Handwriting | (150, 850) | 3 | 152 |
| LSST | (2459, 2466) | 6 | 36 |
| NATOPS | (180, 180) | 24 | 51 |
| RacketSports | (151, 152) | 6 | 30 |
| SelfRegulationSCP2 | (200, 180) | 7 | 1152 |
| CharacterTrajectories | (1422, 1436) | 3 | 60–182 |
| Dataset | Dataset sizes (train, val, test) | Variable Number | Sliding Window Length |
| SMD | (566724, 141681, 708420) | 38 | 100 |
| MSL | (44653, 11664, 73729) | 55 | 100 |
| SMAP | (108146, 27037, 427617) | 25 | 100 |
| SWaT | (396000, 99000, 449919) | 51 | 100 |
| PSM | (105984, 26497, 87841) | 25 | 100 |
| Method | Scanned settings | Runs | Used |
| DrafTS | 11 paired settings | 11 | 10 |
| FFT-high | cutoff ; energy target – | 10 | 8 |
| FFT-low | fraction ; energy target – | 11 | 8 |
| DCT-high | cutoff ; energy target – | 10 | 8 |
| STFT-high | cutoff ; window 24; overlap 0.75 | 9 | 7 |
| FFT-adap | mask maximum – ; energy target – | 7 | 4 |
| Dataset | Horizon | Crossformer | PatchTST | iTransformer | TimeMixer | TimeFilter | L-Drive | ||||||||||||||||||
| ( 2023 ) | ( 2023 ) | ( 2023 ) | ( 2024a ) | ( 2025 ) | ( 2026 ) | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | ||||||||||||||
| MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | MSE | MAE | ||
| ETTh1 | 96 | 0.394 | 0.404 | 0.383 | 0.397 | 0.394 | 0.392 | 0.393 | 0.392 | 0.384 | 0.391 | 0.380 | 0.391 | 0.401 | 0.395 | 0.392 | 0.394 | 0.419 | 0.423 | 0.416 | 0.422 | 0.401 | 0.406 | 0.388 | 0.402 |
| 192 | 0.436 | 0.431 | 0.424 | 0.423 | 0.447 | 0.423 | 0.447 | 0.423 | 0.438 | 0.422 | 0.431 | 0.420 | 0.443 | 0.420 | 0.442 | 0.420 | 0.482 | 0.449 | 0.458 | 0.444 | 0.449 | 0.429 | 0.447 | 0.429 | |
| 336 | 0.471 | 0.453 | 0.471 | 0.450 | 0.490 | 0.444 | 0.488 | 0.443 | 0.487 | 0.446 | 0.475 | 0.446 | 0.492 | 0.441 | 0.484 | 0.440 | 0.499 | 0.456 | 0.494 | 0.456 | 0.499 | 0.458 | 0.489 | 0.452 | |
| Subset | Metric | Crossformer [-2pt] ( 2023 ) | PatchTST [-2pt] ( 2023 ) | iTransformer [-2pt] ( 2023 ) | TimeMixer [-2pt] ( 2024a ) | TimeFilter [-2pt] ( 2025 ) | L-Drive [-2pt] ( 2026 ) | ||||||
| Raw | DrafTS | Raw | DrafTS | Raw | DrafTS | Raw | DrafTS | Raw | DrafTS | Raw | DrafTS | ||
| Yearly | sMAPE | 15.369 | 15.059 | 13.926 | 13.859 | 14.076 | 14.023 | 15.343 | 15.169 | 13.996 | 14.032 | 14.076 | 13.896 |
| MASE | 3.571 | 3.442 | 3.177 | 3.125 | 3.169 | 3.159 | 3.450 | 3.368 | 3.115 | 3.111 | 3.177 | 3.102 | |
| OWA | 0.919 | 0.894 | 0.826 | 0.817 | 0.829 | 0.827 | 0.904 | 0.888 | 0.820 | 0.821 | 0.830 | 0.815 | |
| Quarterly | sMAPE | 11.467 | 11.588 | 10.640 | 10.664 | 10.834 | 10.741 | 12.686 | 12.048 | 11.289 | 10.971 | 11.151 | 10.899 |
| MASE | 1.302 | 1.369 | 1.257 | 1.257 | 1.260 | 1.251 | 1.552 | 1.460 | 1.326 | 1.264 | 1.371 | 1.306 | |
| Dataset | Crossformer ( 2023 ) | PatchTST ( 2023 ) | iTransformer ( 2023 ) | TimeMixer ( 2024a ) | TimeFilter ( 2025 ) | L-Drive ( 2026 ) | ||||||
| Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | |
| Handwriting | 18.98 | 19.02 | 19.84 | 21.14 | 11.76 | 18.35 | 4.59 | 5.45 | 9.45 | 10.67 | 9.22 | 9.45 |
| LSST | 51.55 | 53.61 | 54.07 | 53.73 | 57.91 | 58.57 | 56.27 | 56.34 | 60.34 | 60.84 | 54.41 | 55.08 |
| NATOPS | 73.33 | 75.00 | 74.07 | 75.00 | 80.19 | 80.37 | 31.11 | 43.52 | 77.96 | 78.70 | 29.26 | 38.15 |
| RacketSports | 71.93 | 73.03 | 63.38 | 66.23 | 70.18 | 76.97 | 50.44 | 51.10 | 61.62 | 63.16 | 58.55 | 60.09 |
| SelfRegulationSCP2 | 55.00 | 55.19 | 48.15 | 49.07 | 51.30 | 55.74 | 48.89 | 49.26 | 51.85 | 50.56 | 50.56 | 51.11 |
| Dataset | Metric | Crossformer ( 2023 ) | PatchTST ( 2023 ) | iTransformer ( 2023 ) | TimeMixer ( 2024a ) | TimeFilter ( 2025 ) | L-Drive ( 2026 ) | ||||||
| Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | Raw | + DrafTS | ||
| SMD | Precision | 56.08 | 64.26 | 70.92 | 71.27 | 72.72 | 74.46 | 66.52 | 67.56 | 63.14 | 70.91 | 70.87 | 70.98 |
| Recall | 88.47 | 87.70 | 89.22 | 88.33 | 87.84 | 88.01 | 89.85 | 89.98 | 89.05 | 87.70 | 88.38 | 88.43 | |
| F1 | 68.64 | 74.14 | 79.03 | 78.89 | 79.56 | 80.67 | 76.44 | 77.13 | 73.81 | 78.37 | 78.65 | 78.75 | |
| MSL | Precision | 82.38 | 82.43 | 80.58 | 79.96 | 79.75 | 79.86 | 81.15 | 80.97 | 80.17 | 81.89 | 81.27 | 80.25 |
| Recall | 87.91 | 87.91 | 87.27 | 88.22 | 88.22 | 88.22 | 87.27 | 88.58 | 87.74 | 87.63 | 87.27 | 87.74 | |
| Dataset | Horizon | Raw | Raw + RC | Analyt. + [Amp., Freq., ] | Analyt. + | Analyt. + [Amp., Freq., ] + RC | DrafTS (Ours) |
| SNR=3 | 16 | 0.551 / 0.391 | 0.578 / 0.426 | 0.582 / 0.427 | 0.546 / 0.389 | 0.524 / 0.378 | 0.508 / 0.363 |
| SNR=3 | 64 | 0.848 / 0.620 | 0.849 / 0.628 | 0.843 / 0.617 | 0.886 / 0.651 | 0.880 / 0.645 | 0.839 / 0.616 |
| SNR=5 | 16 | 0.508 / 0.415 | 0.451 / 0.369 | 0.499 / 0.408 | 0.490 / 0.399 | 0.412 / 0.333 | 0.411 / 0.332 |
| SNR=5 | 64 | 0.788 / 0.611 | 0.821 / 0.635 | 0.827 / 0.635 | 0.843 / 0.652 | 0.792 / 0.615 | 0.778 / 0.608 |
| SNR=7 | 16 | 0.414 / 0.377 | 0.329 / 0.298 | 0.420 / 0.380 | 0.363 / 0.334 | 0.324 / 0.295 | 0.320 / 0.289 |
| SNR=7 | 64 | 0.795 / 0.640 | 0.794 / 0.641 | 0.781 / 0.621 | 0.733 / 0.594 | 0.734 / 0.596 | 0.724 / 0.586 |