Oct 10, 2025J/K move · Enter open · S save
Haroon Gharwi, Yue Dai, Kai Shu
Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA · Department of Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Real-world time-series regression often involves non-stationarity, heteroscedasticity, and regime changes, under which recent prediction errors may contain structured information about local temporal mismatch between model predictions and observations. Learning how to represent and reuse these errors can therefore provide useful information for subsequent prediction. We introduce the Variability-Aware Recursive Neural Network (VARNN), a residual-aware architecture for supervised time-series regression that learns an explicit residual-memory state from recent prediction errors and uses it to condition subsequent predictions. Specifically, VARNN maps scalar prediction innovations into a learned nonlinear, vector-valued residual representation over a short context. Across nine datasets spanning energy, healthcare, and environmental domains, VARNN achieves lower test MSE than the compared static, lag-based, and sequence-model baselines. Targeted ablations further show that learned projected residual memory improves predictive accuracy over direct scalar residual feedback, supporting the benefit of a learned nonlinear representation of prediction deviations.