Time Series Classification

Latest papers 129

Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

TIGER: Time-Series Classification with In-Context-Learning Gated Ensemble of Representations

A representation family is a distinct way of extracting features from time series. Ensemble algorithms that combine several representation families remain the most accurate approach to time series classification. Current state-of-the-art ensembles, most notably HIVE-COTE2.0, pair a bespoke classification algorithm with each representation family and combine their predictions using a fixed, non-adaptive rule. We present TIGER (Time-series classification with In-context-learning Gated Ensemble of Representations), which instead applies the same small portfolio of three general-purpose classifiers (Ridge, Extra Trees, and Naive Bayes) to four representations from four distinct families, stacking the resulting twelve base learners' predictions into a meta-feature matrix. The final prediction is produced by an adaptive meta-classification rule that chooses, independently for each data set, between a weighted hard majority vote and TabICLv2, a pretrained tabular foundation model used in-context as a meta-classifier, based on the mean number of training samples available per class. On a 142-data-set benchmark drawn from the UCR time series classification archive, TIGER obtains the best mean accuracy, balanced accuracy, and F1-score among six compared algorithms, including HIVE-COTE2.0, and significantly outperforms each of the other five individually. TIGER's adaptive rule also meaningfully outperforms either of its two constituent meta-classification methods used alone, and its single hyperparameter, tuned using only a twenty-data-set development subset, is shown to generalize to the full evaluation benchmark. We further characterize TIGER's design through an extensive set of ablation experiments and report the design alternatives that we investigated and ultimately discarded.
Oct 4, 2026cs.LG

The Effect of Missingness-Pattern Mismatch on Method Selection for Time-Series Classification: A Controlled Empirical Study

Classifiers for time-series classification are commonly selected on validation data, but the temporal pattern of missing observations at deployment may differ from the pattern seen during validation. We examine whether such a mismatch affects validation-based classifier selection. In a controlled 2×22 \times 2 design, validation and test sets of 64 univariate UCR datasets were masked with either random point missingness or circular block missingness at six rates from 5% to 30%, imputed by linear interpolation, and used to select among three prespecified candidates: 1NN-DTW, MiniRocket with a Ridge classifier, and a statistical-feature Random Forest. Training data remained complete, and selections made under matched and mismatched validation patterns were compared on the same masked test sets. Mismatched validation reduced the test balanced accuracy of the selected classifier by 1.14 percentage points on average (95% CI 0.79 to 1.51), with losses on 49 of the 64 datasets. The loss was negligible at 5% missingness and increased to 2.46 percentage points at 30%. It was concentrated in point-masked deployment (1.84 percentage points), where block-masked validation shifted selection away from the usually best candidate, while the effect for block-masked deployment was small and not significant. Mismatch changed the selected classifier in 35.5% of paired comparisons, but a changed selection did not always reduce performance. A supplementary analysis with non-wrapping linear blocks reproduced these findings with a larger effect (1.67 percentage points). Matching the missingness pattern of validation data to the expected deployment pattern is therefore a simple safeguard for method selection, particularly at higher missingness rates.
Oct 4, 2026cs.LG

LogSig-SSM: Time-Series Modelling with Multi-Scale Log-Signature Compression for State-Space Models

Time-series data are often sampled irregularly at high frequencies and exhibit long-range dependencies, which makes long-horizon modelling difficult. Continuous-time models such as neural controlled differential equations (NCDEs) and neural rough differential equations (NRDEs) can handle irregular sampling, but they scale poorly to long sequences. Selective state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba scale linearly with sequence length, but they provide limited recurrent mixing across hidden dimensions within a single block. We propose LogSig-SSM (Log-Signature Compression for State-Space Models), which first compresses long multivariate time series into a shorter sequence of tokens using multi-scale windowed log-signatures, and then processes these tokens with a selective SSM backbone. LogSig-SSM is scalable and robust to irregular sampling, combining log-signature tokens that capture higher-order cross-channel interactions with a selective SSM that models long-range dependencies. The model also admits a continuous-time interpretation as an NCDE/NRDE-style system driven by a log-signature-based input, in which selectivity induces an input-dependent rescaling of the latent dynamics. Across four benchmarks, namely long-sequence classification on UEA, high-frequency physiological regression on PPG-DaLiA, multivariate weather forecasting, and irregularly sampled clinical prediction on PhysioNet Sepsis, LogSig-SSM outperforms or matches strong SSM and continuous-time baselines while training up to 30×30\times faster and using up to 37×37\times less GPU memory than Mamba on the longest sequences.
Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

TopTimeNet: Topologically-assisted time-series classification model

Distinguishing periodic from chaotic dynamics in a time series is a fundamental challenge in both physics and engineering. Yet, end-to-end learned architectures must discover both a representation and a decision boundary from data, at substantial cost. We introduce TopTimeNet, which decouples these tasks: a fixed, non-learned stage extracts a 4242-dimensional geometric and topological descriptor from Takens delay embeddings and persistent homology, and a lightweight learnable stage performs classification. On a benchmark of 4949 nonlinear dynamical systems, a 1,6381{,}638-parameter configuration matches the mean accuracy of one with 33×33\times more trainable parameters. Additionally, this approach delivers mean accuracy comparable to convolutional neural networks and surpasses the average performance of converged Transformer models, while requiring three to four orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters. Robustness also depends sharply on where noise is introduced: TopTimeNet degrades gracefully under perturbations to its precomputed features, but degrades sharply when noise is introduced into the raw signal and the full feature-extraction pipeline is recomputed, showing that robustness to perturbations of the precomputed features does not imply robustness of the complete raw-signal-to-prediction pipeline. These results show that decoupling fixed geometric and topological feature construction from a lightweight discriminative stage can achieve comparable classification accuracy with substantially fewer trainable parameters.
Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

Towards Robust Time Series Learning via Capacity-Centric Modulation

Sample-level reliability heterogeneity is common in deep time series learning. Standard training pipelines apply a uniform regularization setting to all samples, which can under-regularize corrupted samples and over-restrict clean samples. Common robustness approaches filter observations in data space or impose priors on latent representations. We propose Capacity-Centric Modulation (CCM) as a complementary, sample-adaptive regularization principle. Under this principle, we introduce SACM (Sample-Adaptive Capacity Modulation), a task-agnostic framework that exploits spectral sparsity to assign sample-wise dropout probabilities along internal activation paths. SACM integrates into existing backbones without architectural redesign and preserves the deterministic inference pipeline. Across 301 real-world dataset-backbone pairs covering 9 forecasting, 32 classification, and 4 anomaly-detection datasets, SACM reduces forecasting MSE by 6.7% on average and improves classification accuracy and point-adjusted F1 by 3.04% and 17.05%, respectively, relative to unmodified backbones, with zero test-time overhead.
Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

A Time-Aware Bag-of-Receptive-Fields for Interpretable Irregular Time Series Classification

Irregular time series, characterized by non-uniform sampling intervals, missing observations, and variable lengths, are ubiquitous in healthcare, mobility, and environmental monitoring, yet effective and interpretable classifiers for this setting are limited. Existing approaches often rely on imputation, which can obscure the temporal structure of the data, or require complex neural architectures that are opaque and difficult to explain. In this work, we extend the Bag-Of-Receptive-Fields (BORF), a fast, deterministic, and interpretable transform for time series, to the irregular setting. Our key contribution is a time-weighted normalization scheme in which each observation is weighted proportionally to its associated time delta, making pattern extraction sensitive to the actual temporal distribution of samples rather than only their index position. This requires deriving an efficient sliding-window recurrence for the time-weighted standard deviation, preserving the linear time complexity of BORF. We benchmark the resulting method against state-of-the-art irregular time series classifiers on datasets from the PYRREGULAR repository, demonstrating competitive classification performance with the added benefit of human-interpretable explanations.
Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

Revitalizing Medical Time Series with Vision-Informed Retrieval: A Vision-Language Perspective

Medical time series (MedTS) underpin many clinical classification tasks, yet existing methods usually represent them only as numerical sequences and underuse the morphology that is explicit in waveform inspection. To bridge this gap, we introduce Vision-Informed Retrieval (ViRe), which uses a frozen VLM-derived waveform representation as a morphology-aware Query to guide retrieval from raw numerical MedTS features. Specifically, a Vision Query is extracted using pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to obtain morphology-aware priors from waveform plots. A tailored attention-based cross-modal retrieval mechanism then uses the Vision Query to select morphology-relevant temporal and channel evidence from the numerical representation. ViRe demonstrates strong effectiveness against ten established baselines, yielding an overall 6.42% relative improvement over the previous state of the art across six public benchmarks. Code, training scripts, and reproducibility materials are publicly available in the GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Levi-Ackman/ViRe.
Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

MASCIT: A Mask-Aware State Space Classifier for Naturally Irregular Time Series

Naturally irregular time series combine asynchronous observations, missing values, unequal lengths, and nonuniform sampling, while dense adapters can discard temporal structure. We propose a mask-aware state space classifier for irregular time series (MASCIT), which supplies observation masks to the encoder and excludes invalid steps from gated temporal aggregation. Across 34 irregular time series datasets, MASCIT yielded the strongest aggregate point estimate and was the only evaluated neural model with three-seed results on every dataset. MASCIT retained the lowest point rank across six overlapping irregularity indicators, while factorial ablations favored partial over full selectivity. These results support selective state space models as effective, executable backbones for naturally irregular time series classification.
Sep 24, 2026cs.LG

SwitchPFN: Shared Switching Dynamics for Frozen In-Context Time Series Classification

Tabular foundation models (TFMs) provide a promising route to time-series classification, but their effectiveness depends on how sequential data are converted into tabular representations. Existing representations face two challenges: global aggregation can lose the order of temporal evolution, while features computed in independently fitted coordinate systems may not have consistent meanings across sequences. We therefore view representation design for TFMs as a problem in its own right: the representation should preserve local temporal transitions while maintaining a shared feature definition across samples. We propose SwitchPFN, which learns a shared projection and regime codebook from the training sequences, making local dynamic operators and transition features directly comparable across samples. Across the evaluated benchmarks, SwitchPFN achieves the highest mean accuracy among the evaluated methods, improving over the strongest baseline by 4.47% relatively. Ablation studies, parameter sensitivity analyses, and reduced-training-data experiments further examine the contributions of the representation, its main design choices, and its behavior when labeled data are limited.
Sep 24, 2026cs.LG

Neuralized Multi-Wavelet Decomposition for Time Series Classification and Forecasting

Time series analysis is fundamental in domains such as finance, healthcare, and meteorology. Real-world time series often exhibit multiscale characteristics shaped by diverse latent factors, resulting in intricate temporal patterns and rich frequency structures. However, existing approaches typically focus on either frequency-domain decomposition or time-domain pattern extraction in isolation, neglecting their joint structure. This decoupled modeling limits representation expressiveness and undermines performance in tasks requiring simultaneous temporal and spectral reasoning. To address this gap, we propose m-WCN, a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that neuralizes multi-wavelet decomposition for joint extraction of temporal patterns and frequency components. By approximating the classical GHM multi-wavelet transform with trainable convolutional operators and enforcing orthogonality constraints, m-WCN produces interpretable multi-resolution representations. Built on this foundation, we introduce two task-specific architectures: TFBC for time series classification, which boosts discriminative features across frequency scales, and FTB for forecasting, which ensembles frequency-aware predictors. Extensive experiments on 64 UCR datasets and seven public forecasting benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Built on the neuralized m-WCN, our TFBC and FTB outperform various baseline models across diverse datasets, achieving average improvements of 19.97% in classification and 19.92% in forecasting tasks.
Sep 24, 2026cs.LG

Learnable Time-Frequency Masks for Explaining Time-Series Classifiers

Time-series explainability remains challenging because discriminative information is often encoded in latent frequency or time-frequency features rather than in the raw signal itself. Existing attribution methods typically operate either in the time domain or in a fixed transform domain, limiting their ability to capture salient information across different representations. We propose XACT, a general framework that learns sparse attribution masks over coefficients from arbitrary invertible time-frequency transforms. We evaluate the framework on the STFT, the continuous wavelet transform, and the discrete wavelet transform. In addition, we extend the virtual inspection layer approach from the STFT to both wavelet transforms, enabling LRP to generate explanations in these representations. On a synthetic dataset, XACT produces precise explanations and is less prone to highlighting spurious features than the tested baselines. Across two real-world datasets, XACT produces sparse and structured explanations, although no method performs best across all quantitative evaluation criteria. These results demonstrate that learning explanations directly in time-frequency representations offers a flexible approach to interpreting deep-learning models for time series data.
Sep 24, 2026cs.LG

Edge AI on Constrained Devices for Binary Sleep-Wake Classification in Dynamic Environments

This paper presents an Edge AI-based system for detecting sleep and wake states in non-stationary mobile environments using resource-constrained embedded hardware. Conventional approaches relying on accelerometer-based activity metrics are highly susceptible to motion and vibration artifacts and are limited by strict compute and energy budgets of wearable and IoT devices. To address these challenges, a multimodal pipeline is designed and implemented on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. The system combines inertial sensing for head movement analysis and visual pose classification. A dual-core architecture with FreeRTOS enables parallel execution of real-time data acquisition and on-device inference. Sleep detection follows a two-stage strategy: low-movement detection over a temporal window, followed by visual validation of poses. Experimental results show accuracies of 96.5% for motion-based detection and 89% for pose classification, yielding robust binary sleep-wake classification. Field tests confirmed feasibility in representative mobile scenarios. The results demonstrate that privacy-preserving, local sleep detection is achievable on edge hardware through careful co-design, while highlighting limitations in sensing intrusiveness, dataset scale, and system integration.
Sep 22, 2026cs.LG

Evaluating the Effectiveness of SechKAN on 1D Data

The connection between the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem (KART) and neural network design has led to the development of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), with applications ranging from STEM problems to AI tasks. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of a KAN variant, SechKAN, which relies on hyperbolic secant (sech) functions as basis functions, with a 1D projection to reduce the number of parameters to a level comparable to MLPs. We evaluate SechKAN on three 1D classification datasets: UCI Human Activity Recognition (UCI HAR), ElectricDevices, and Crop, and compare it with several effective networks, including EfficientKAN, MLP, CNN1D, ResNet1D, and DSCNN1D, using approximately comparable parameter budgets. The results indicate that SechKAN achieves competitive performance across the three datasets, with particularly strong performance on Crop. Ablation studies further show that grid size and normalization affect performance, suggesting that SechKAN's effectiveness depends on the dataset and architectural choices. Our source code and experimental implementation are publicly available at: https://github.com/hoangthangta/SechKAN_1D.
Sep 20, 2026cs.LG

ETH-TraceBench: A Large-Scale Event-Stream Benchmark for Ethereum DeFi under Temporal, Protocol, and Contract Shift

Ethereum decentralized finance (DeFi) provides a public, time-stamped record of transaction-level event streams, but the same public symbols can create strong machine-learning shortcuts. We introduce ETH-TraceBench, a benchmark for evaluating Ethereum DeFi representations under temporal, protocol, pool/infrastructure, and symbolic shift. The raw event universe covers January 2021-December 2025 and contains 1.35 billion transactions with logs and 5.01 billion raw log rows. Model evaluation uses a fixed 911,267-instance supervised sample, training on 2021-2024, selecting models on 2025H1, and testing on 2025H2. Simple models perform strongly on the aggregate temporal test: TraceStats-GB reaches 0.953 macro-F1 and TopicEmitterHashMLP 0.959 on the canonical DEX test set. Performance drops sharply under protocol novelty, with macro-F1 of 0.794, 0.743, and 0.766 for TraceStats-GB, TopicEmitterTrace-SGD, and TopicEmitterHashMLP, while strict unseen-pool scores remain 0.927, 0.897, and 0.935. Uniswap v4 and Ekubo v1, both absent from supervised training, are materially harder than the full test. Jointly masking emitter and topic identity reduces DEX macro-F1 to 0.916 and liquidation macro-F1 to 0.774 for TopicEmitterTrace-SGD. A standard Transformer over log-index-ordered events provides no consistent advantage over a deterministic shuffle of the same events, indicating that high aggregate scores can arise without sophisticated chronological modeling. A natural-prevalence audit estimates 2025H2 DEX prevalence among logged Ethereum transactions at about 22.5%, and a deterministic 400-transaction audit finds complete agreement with task label sources and independently re-queried raw-log counts. ETH-TraceBench therefore treats difficult transfer and controlled-input conditions, rather than a single aggregate score, as the main evaluation target.
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Multi-source Transfer Learning of Time Series with a Shapelet-based Distance Measure

Transfer learning is an effective technique for addressing data scarcity in deep learning for time series classification, but its success depends on the selection of source datasets. Conventional transferability estimation methods are often computationally expensive, as they require fully pre-training a model on each potential source dataset to assess its suitability. This paper introduces a novel, training-free source selection method named Shapelet Matching. Our approach first identifies discriminative shapelets from the target and potential source datasets. Then, Shapelet Matching quantifies dataset similarity by comparing the extracted sets of shapelets. To mitigate the risk of negative transfer from selecting an unsuitable single source, we introduce a multi-source transfer learning method. We select several source datasets based on their shapelet-based similarity scores, combine them into a single multi-source dataset, and use this aggregated dataset for pre-training. The model is then fine-tuned on the target task. We evaluated our method on 128 datasets from the UCR Archive using both temporal CNN and Transformer architectures. The empirical results demonstrate that our multi-source pre-training reduces the risk of negative transfer on average. Shapelet Matching achieves the strongest performance for the CNN backbone and remains competitive for patch-based Transformer architectures, while avoiding the cost of pre-training a separate model for every candidate source.
Sep 9, 2026eess.SP

Deep Learning-Based Detection of Electrical Faults and Power Quality Disturbances in Aerospace Power Systems

More Electric Aircraft require fast and reliable monitoring of high-frequency electrical networks, yet most power quality disturbance and fault diagnosis methods are developed for conventional 50 or 60 Hz grids. This work presents a hardware-aware deep learning framework for multiclass detection of electrical faults and power quality disturbances in a 400 Hz aerospace power system. A high-fidelity simulation model inspired by the Boeing 787 electrical architecture generates voltage and current waveforms for 21 normal, disturbance, switching, open-circuit, and short-circuit conditions. Two datasets, each containing 73,500 samples, are formed from one-dimensional time-series signals and short-time Fourier transform time-frequency representations. Signal-processing augmentation, domain randomization, and class-specific generative adversarial networks increase waveform diversity, and the time-series dataset is released through IEEE DataPort. We compare 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks, long short-term memory networks, CNN-LSTM hybrids, ResNet, MobileNet, and VGG models under common training conditions. A compact ResNet provides the best accuracy-complexity tradeoff, achieving 96.94 percent software test accuracy with 175,685 parameters. After 8-bit quantization and deployment on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale Plus MPSoC ZCU102, the model achieves 95.87 percent accuracy and a measured mean neural-network accelerator latency of 6.90 ms per input record. The results establish simulation-based, accelerator-level feasibility for embedded edge AI in aircraft electrical health monitoring and motivate future end-to-end data acquisition and experimental validation.
Sep 2, 2026cs.LG

SMart: A Multi-source Multi-phase Time Series Representation Transfer Framework

Time series representation learning (TSRL) has attracted growing research interests in recent years. Two recent explorations in TSRL are: i) exploiting a transformer-based framework to learn time series; ii) instead of using only the targeted dataset, borrowing time series from other datasets to to facilitate representation transfer. While these two explorations are shown effective, the self-supervised time series recovery task in (i) and the single-source dataset used in (ii) are technically simple and thus can be enhanced with new ideas. In this work, we propose a new TSRL framework, namely multi-source multi-phase time series representation transfer (SMart), which has two novel mechanisms to address the aforementioned deficiencies: 1) a multi-phase recurrence plots recovery task, in three alternative modes, for guiding the encoder to embed time series dynamics into the time series representation; and 2) a source dataset selector to select multiple suitable source datasets to supplement the original target dataset for pre-training the TSRL encoder. Experimental results show that SMart outperforms several state-of-the-art models for time series representation learning, classification and regression on both uni-variate and multi-variate time series datasets, reducing mean absolute error up to 19.5% for time series regression, and increasing average accuracy up to 1.34% for time series classification.
Aug 31, 2026stat.ML

A convolutional framework for detecting event-driven dynamics in energy price series

This paper develops a general convolutional neural network (CNN) framework for detecting heterogeneous event-driven dynamics in univariate time series windows. We show that the induced CNN class exactly represents classifiers based on range, maximum drawup, maximum drawdown and slope change, and uniformly approximates realised volatility and autoregressive explosiveness on compact domains. We further establish error bounds for representative rules in finite samples and an oracle inequality for learning across them. Simulations show that the proposed model can match or outperform classifiers based on individual statistics as the training sample grows. In an application to six daily energy price series, a hierarchical CNN distinguishes event windows and event families. Applied without retraining to observations withheld after 20 February 2026, the fitted model identifies predominantly geopolitical dynamics in several oil and refined product series around the outbreak of the 2026 Iran war, while distinguishing a contemporaneous natural gas spike associated with weather.
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

TSPFN: A Temporal Tabular Foundation Model for Physiological Time Series Classification

Designing models that generalize effectively in low- to medium-data regimes remains a primary challenge in medical machine learning, particularly for physiological time-series classification. While tabular foundation models such as TabPFN offer an attractive alternative to conventional fine-tuning through in-context learning, they are not designed to capture the temporal dependencies inherent to physiological signals. ~In this paper, we introduce TSPFN, a foundation model that redesigns TabPFN's architecture for time series data. TSPFN integrates structured temporal representations and positional embeddings to capture intra-sample temporal and channel dependencies. To fully leverage its spatio-temporal design, the model is pretrained on 140,000 real-world physiological time series across multiple medical domains. This yields a unified, generalizable framework capable of learning the specificities of medical time series. Experiments across diverse physiological benchmarks demonstrate that TSPFN consistently outperforms standard tabular baselines and TabPFN, and achieves superior cross-domain generalization compared to specialized deep time-series models. All our experiments, ablation studies, and pre-processing scheme are publicly available at https://github.com/Jeremstym/TSPFN
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Local Reference Geometry Residual Augmentation for Imbalanced Time Series Classification

Imbalanced time series classification is often addressed by changing the training distribution, objective, logits, or final threshold. These interventions address important biases, yet leave a representation-level question unmeasured: after minority support is reduced, does a learned feature space remain locally reliable around minority regions? We identify a training-local geometry failure: under imbalance, minority cases can lie in sparse, rest-dominated, or mixed feature-space neighborhoods, even when the representation retains useful global class structure. To diagnose and repair this failure, we propose Local Reference Geometry (LRG), a lightweight post-hoc feature augmentation module applied between a fixed feature extractor and the classifier head. Using training features only, LRG measures local exposure and class-mixture risk, then augments each fixed feature with a standardized signed displacement from nearby training geometry and an LDA-projected residual summary. On controlled UCR/Bake Off Redux imbalance benchmarks, paired raw-versus-LRG comparisons show gains for learned, pretrained, and fixed representations, including when LRG is combined with training-level interventions and post-encoder classifier corrections. Ablations show that the gain comes from the signed local residual appended to the original feature, rather than from generic prototype distances, affinity features, scalar statistics, or VLAD-style codes. Further analyses support the proposed local-geometry failure hypothesis: minority neighborhoods become increasingly rest-exposed under imbalance, training-local risk identifies error-prone regions, and LRG gains concentrate in those high-risk regions.
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Supraglacial Lake Fate Is Knowable Long Before the Season Ends

A supraglacial lake on the Greenland Ice Sheet ends its melt season in one of four ways: it drains rapidly through a hydrofracture, drains slowly across the surface, refreezes in place, or is buried by late-season snowfall. Which one occurs decides whether the meltwater reaches the ice bed. Satellite classifiers recover the outcome accurately but only after the season closes, and how much of a season each outcome actually requires has never been measured. We measure it directly: holding the representation and the classifier fixed, we truncate the input at 14 cutoffs from May 1 to December 31, retrain at each, and record the earliest cutoff at which each outcome's per-class F1 reaches a fixed target. The outcomes resolve in a consistent order, two of them months early: rapid drainage by July 15 and slow drainage by August 1, respectively 92 and 75 days ahead of the earliest date a full-season pipeline can be computed at all, with buried and refreeze following at 44 and 30 days. Five further learners, from a majority-class floor and 54 summary statistics to a trigger-based early classifier, leave the ordering largely intact: the three that produce a per-class trajectory reproduce it in five of six cases despite end-of-season accuracies differing by up to 18 percentage points, and it survives leave-one-basin-out evaluation, though not a move to machine-labeled lakes in an unseen season. Every feature we compute at day t reads only days up to t, at a cost of at most 1.3 percentage points. A monitoring system should therefore not have one release date: rapid drainage can be flagged on July 15, three months before a full-season pipeline can be computed at all.
Aug 25, 2026cs.LG

ChorusTIC: Training-Free Multivariate Time Series Classification via Chorus In-Context Learning

Time series classification underpins applications in healthcare, sensing, and industrial monitoring. Although time series foundation models support forecasting and transferable representation learning, classification still typically requires fitting a task-specific classifier on each target dataset, while individual channels of multivariate inputs are often encoded independently. We introduce ChorusTIC, a classification-native foundation model for in-context classification across heterogeneous channel configurations without target-task parameter updates. ChorusTIC combines episode-consistent Random Subchannel Slot Concatenation with a shared dual-axis encoder to model temporal and cross-channel interactions and map variable channel configurations into a fixed-width representation independent of the original channel count. It then calibrates feature axes using context-derived distributions and predicts query labels through leakage-protected in-context learning. We pretrain ChorusTIC solely on synthetic labeled episodes comprising context and query sets that share a task background, with classes distinguished by sparse temporal or cross-channel rules. Evaluations on the complete UEA-30 and UCR-128 archives show strong full-context and low-label performance without target-specific classifier fitting.
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

Robust and Efficient Noisy-Label Time-Series Classification via Dynamic Time Warping Based Granular Ball Computing

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW)-based Nearest-Neighbor (NN) classifiers are effective for time-series classification but are vulnerable to mislabeled training samples and require numerous DTW computations during inference. We propose DTW-based Granular Ball Computing (DTW-GBC), which organizes temporally similar training samples into granular balls and performs classification at the granule level. We further develop two granular-ball construction strategies for DTW-GBC. Experiments on four benchmark datasets with symmetric label noise show that the two DTW-GBC variants generally mitigate the performance degradation caused by label noise while requiring substantially fewer comparisons than DTW-based 1-NN during inference. These findings suggest that DTW-GBC provides a favorable balance between classification robustness and inference efficiency.
Aug 8, 2026cs.LG

FreSH: Frequency-Segmented Hierarchical Multi-Expert Framework for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC) demands models that can effectively capture complex temporal patterns across multiple scales while remaining computationally efficient. However, existing approaches generally struggle to reconcile fine-grained representation learning, especially under class imbalance and real-world constraints. In this paper, we present FreSH, a Frequency-Segmented Hierarchical Multi-Expert Framework designed to address these challenges. FreSH introduces a new perspective for MTSC by enabling adaptive, multi-scale analysis of temporal signals, allowing different aspects of the data to be modeled in a complementary and coordinated manner. By combining localized specialization with holistic context modeling, FreSH achieves strong representational capacity without incurring excessive computational overhead. An adaptive fusion strategy further enhances flexibility, enabling the model to dynamically emphasize the most informative components of the input. In addition, we incorporate a more robust optimization objective that improves learning stability across varying sample difficulties and class distributions. Extensive evaluations on 30 UEA benchmark datasets and real-world vibration data demonstrate that FreSH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in classification accuracy, while substantially reducing model size and efficiency.
Aug 6, 2026cs.LG

Is Self-Pretraining really useful to improve diagnosis in medical Time Series?

Inspired by recent evidence that transformer architectures benefit from Self-PreTraining (SPT) on long-context benchmarks, we investigate whether similar gains extend to multimodal, multivariate, and even simple univariate medical time series. Our objective is to assess the impact of SPT on the performance and scalability of transformer-based models across diverse medical applications, particularly under limited data conditions. We evaluate transformer architectures on three representative medical time-series tasks: rehabilitation robotics (Camargo dataset), stress detection (Non-EEG Stress), and Parkinson's disease detection (Gait Parkinson's Disease). Models are trained either from scratch or through SPT using four masking-based objectives designed to promote temporal and cross-modal representation learning, and we systematically vary model depth to examine how capacity interacts with pre-training benefits. Across datasets and configurations, SPT consistently improves classification accuracy by 0-6 percentage points depending on masking strategy, dataset and architecture, with gains observed not only in multivariate settings but also when models are restricted to simple univariate inputs. The improvements increase for deeper models that can better exploit the enriched temporal representations learned during pre-training. These findings indicate that SPT is a simple and general strategy that enhances transformer performance on medical time-series tasks without requiring task-specific architectural changes, supporting its potential to improve robustness and accuracy in data-limited clinical settings.
Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

IMFACT: Counterfactual Explanations for Time Series via Intrinsic Mode Function Substitution

Oscillatory signals, such as vibration, carry class-discriminative information in specific frequency bands; perturbing them in raw feature space for counterfactual analysis easily destroys their temporal structure and produces physically implausible results. In this work, we introduce IMFACT (IMF-based counterfACTuals), a model-agnostic framework for generating plausible counterfactual explanations for time series classifiers that operates in the decomposition space of Empirical Mode Decomposition. An input signal is split into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs), and selected IMFs are progressively substituted with those of a Nearest Unlike Neighbour (NUN) until the classifier flips to the target class. We evaluate six IMF-selection strategies and a multi-NUN cycling extension on two UCR benchmarks (FaultDetectionA, FruitFlies). The variance-based strategy with three NUNs outperforms two prominent baseline techniques on reliability and plausibility metrics, while cycling across three NUNs yields the best proximity across both datasets.
Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

Benchmarking Deep Learning Models for Dense Event Classification of Offshore Wind Infrastructure in Sentinel-1 Time Series

Monitoring of offshore wind energy infrastructure life cycles, especially during the deployment phase, is an important contribution for stakeholders to make informed decisions in a phase of increasing deployment activities. ESA's Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mission produces large data archives that enable the global monitoring of offshore wind infrastructure. Turning these high-volume archives into information requires algorithms that automatically extract single event labels from dense time series at a global scale. In this study, we present a structured comparison of ten deep learning model-training variants for the dense classification of Sentinel-1 based offshore wind infrastructure time series, aiming to advance rule-based event classification of this task. We trained LSTM, Transformer, and fully connected model variants with monotemporal, unidirectional, and bidirectional context awareness, each with and without self-supervised pretraining. Among these, the supervised BiLSTM performs best, raising the target AUC score from 0.7853 for the rule-based baseline to 0.8509, and the perfect match rate from 0.3508 to 0.5063. Combining the BiLSTM predictions with the existing baseline labels in a label-transition-minimising ensemble further improves agreement with the test data. Using these improved labels, we isolate the deployment phase of individual turbines at a global scale and conduct a regional and subregional analysis covering 2016-01-01 to 2025-03-31, reporting median deployment durations of 84 d (China), 242 d (EU), and 258 d (UK). Deployment-related drivers, including legal regulations such as subsidies, and environmental conditions, emerge clearly from the analysed results across multiple spatial scales.
Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

TS2TabPFN: Time Series Classification and Extrinsic Regression through Feature Extraction and a Tabular Foundation Model

Time series data are ubiquitous in practical applications, where classification (TSC) and extrinsic regression (TSER) have emerged as essential tasks for obtaining value from temporal sequences. While the literature has seen significant progress through feature-based and deep learning models, existing methods often focus either on the quality of feature extraction or on the intrinsic predictive power of complex architectures applied to raw data. This division creates a gap between the control offered by feature engineering and the automated performance of end-to-end models. This paper proposes TS2TabPFN, a framework that bridges this gap by integrating explicit feature extraction with TabPFN 2.5, a cutting-edge foundation model for tabular data, to leverage its predictive capabilities. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that TS2TabPFN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in TSER tasks with statistical significance, providing a robust and efficient alternative for TSC and surpassing most of the currently best-performing algorithms. These results suggest that combining foundation models with structured features overcomes single-paradigm limitations, establishing a new time series state-of-the-art.
Aug 3, 2026stat.ME

Statistical comparisons of time-series feature sets on classification tasks

In recent years, numerous open-source software libraries have been developed for computing sets of features from univariate time series. The type and number of features vary across these feature sets, which have been constructed with varying disciplinary perspectives on quantifying structure in time-series data. To date, the relative strengths and weaknesses of these feature sets on time-series classification problems remains largely unexplored. Here we aimed to understand the relative performance of six open-source feature sets and three baseline feature sets (based on distributional and/or basic spectral structure) across 124 univariate time-series classification problems using a normalization-based approach to problem-level benchmarking that better indexes the relative strengths and weaknesses of different algorithms compared to prior rank-based approaches. Despite their dramatic differences in size, composition, and computation time, we found that feature sets performed relatively similarly overall (85.3% of pairwise comparisons resulted in ties), with the largest feature set, tsfresh, exhibiting the strongest overall performance (29.03% wins across all pairwise comparisons against other feature sets). We also highlighted specific problems on which the specific composition of a given feature set gave it a substantial performance advantage or disadvantage, and problems where simple baselines comprised of Fourier coefficients and quantiles were sufficient to achieve strong performance. Our results demonstrate the need to consider problem-level performance when benchmarking time-series feature sets, and highlight the importance of feature make-up in driving relative classification performance.
Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

CENDRe: Concept Extraction with Natural Domain Representations

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used for time-series classification, but their deployment in critical domains requires understanding the temporal and spectral patterns that drive their predictions. Concept extraction (CE) methods identify such patterns by analyzing representations within the models' latent space. However, existing time-series CE methods have three limitations: they operate only in the time domain and overlook frequency features, predefine the number of concepts, and produce localizations misaligned with the regions the model uses. We address these limitations by proposing CENDRe, a concept extraction method for CNNs. It first discovers concepts by clustering per-timestep latent representations in two stages, where silhouette-guided aggregation selects the number of concepts automatically. Then, it localizes each concept through gradients of a presence score that contrasts the latent representations with their prototypes, producing masks that concentrate on the regions driving the concept. These gradients, propagated through a differentiable invertible mapping of the input such as a Fourier transform, yield localizations for the same concepts in the frequency domain. Finally, each concept receives a relevance score that quantifies its contribution to each class. On synthetic benchmarks, CENDRe achieves representation correctness comparable to state-of-the-art CE methods and significantly higher importance correctness. On real bearing-fault data, CENDRe extracts the frequency bands driving the model's predictions, located in regions commonly inspected for fault diagnosis, producing evidence to assess the model that time-domain CE methods cannot.