Overview

Time series forecasting studies how to predict future observations from past values, often across multiple horizons and with missing data, changing regimes, or external drivers such as weather and events. Methods range from classical autoregressive and exponential-smoothing models to recurrent networks, Transformers, state-space models, decomposition and frequency-based approaches, graph models, and pretrained foundation models; probabilistic methods also estimate uncertainty. Current work increasingly combines historical patterns with covariates, retrieval, domain knowledge, and online adaptation, while targeting applications from energy and weather to health, transport, and finance. A central tension is that larger or more complex models do not reliably beat simple baselines, and benchmark accuracy may not reflect robustness, forecast structure, uncertainty calibration, or downstream decision value.

Latest papers

875 papers143 papers in the last four weeks, up 32% on the four weeks before. 0.8% of all new papers.

Oct 30, 2024

EF-LLM: A Continual Learning-Based Framework for AI-Assisted Automation, Enhanced Sparse Prediction, and Hallucination Detection

Accurate prediction helps achieve supply-demand balance in energy systems,thereby supporting operational decision-making and scheduling.Traditional models,which lack AI-assisted automation,often rely heavily on expert knowledge,incur high labor costs,and perform poorly under sparse-data conditions.To address these challenges,this work proposes an Energy Forecasting Large Language Model (EF-LLM),which integrates domain knowledge and temporal data for time-series forecasting while supporting both pre-forecast operations and post-forecast decision-making.EF-LLM's human-artificial intelligence (AI) interaction capabilities further lower the entry barrier for forecasting tasks and reduce the need for additional expert involvement.To support these functions, a continual learning framework with updatable Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and a multi-channel architecture is developed to align heterogeneous multimodal data, enabling EF-LLM to continuously acquire and adapt multimodal knowledge.In addition,EF-LLM improves prediction accuracy under sparse-data conditions by leveraging its ability to process and fuse multimodal information.A Fusion Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (F-PEFT) method is further introduced to effectively exploit both time-series data and textual information.EF-LLM is also the first energy-specific LLM to detect hallucinations and quantify their occurrence rate, achieved via multi-task learning and semantic similarity analysis.This work has achieved success in energy prediction scenarios for load, PV, and wind power forecast.
Feb 7, 2024

Bellman Conformal Inference: Calibrating Prediction Intervals For Time Series

We introduce Bellman Conformal Inference (BCI), a framework that wraps around any time series forecasting models and provides calibrated prediction intervals. Unlike the existing methods, BCI is able to leverage multi-step ahead forecasts and explicitly optimize the average interval lengths by solving a one-dimensional stochastic control problem (SCP) at each time step. In particular, we use the dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal policy for the SCP. We prove that BCI achieves long-term coverage under arbitrary distribution shifts and temporal dependence, even with poor multi-step ahead forecasts. When the raw forecast intervals are approximately calibrated, we prove that BCI is near optimal for its surrogate model predictive control problem. We find empirically that BCI avoids uninformative intervals with infinite lengths under our main experimental configuration and generates substantially shorter prediction intervals when the raw forecast intervals are poorly calibrated.
Feb 4, 2024

FreDF: Learning to Forecast in the Frequency Domain

Time series modeling presents unique challenges due to autocorrelation in both historical data and future sequences. While current research predominantly addresses autocorrelation within historical data, the correlations among future labels are often overlooked. Specifically, modern forecasting models primarily adhere to the Direct Forecast (DF) paradigm, generating multi-step forecasts independently and disregarding label autocorrelation over time. In this work, we demonstrate that the learning objective of DF is biased in the presence of label autocorrelation. To address this issue, we propose the Frequency-enhanced Direct Forecast (FreDF), which mitigates label autocorrelation by learning to forecast in the frequency domain, thereby reducing estimation bias. Our experiments show that FreDF significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and is compatible with a variety of forecast models. Code is available at https://github.com/Master-PLC/FreDF.
Jan 10, 2024

DualDynamics: Synergizing Implicit and Explicit Methods for Robust Irregular Time Series Analysis

Real-world time series analysis faces significant challenges when dealing with irregular and incomplete data. While Neural Differential Equation (NDE) based methods have shown promise, they struggle with limited expressiveness, scalability issues, and stability concerns. Conversely, Neural Flows offer stability but falter with irregular data. We introduce 'DualDynamics', a novel framework that synergistically combines NDE-based method and Neural Flow-based method. This approach enhances expressive power while balancing computational demands, addressing critical limitations of existing techniques. We demonstrate DualDynamics' effectiveness across diverse tasks: classification of robustness to dataset shift, irregularly-sampled series analysis, interpolation of missing data, and forecasting with partial observations. Our results show consistent outperformance over state-of-the-art methods, indicating DualDynamics' potential to advance irregular time series analysis significantly.
Dec 2, 2023

ResNLS: An Improved Model for Stock Price Forecasting

Stock prices forecasting has always been a challenging task. Although many research projects try to address the problem, few of them pay attention to the varying degrees of dependencies between stock prices. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid model that improves the prediction of stock prices by emphasizing the dependencies between adjacent stock prices. The proposed model, ResNLS, is mainly composed of two neural architectures, ResNet and LSTM. ResNet serves as a feature extractor to identify dependencies between stock prices, while LSTM analyzes the initial time series data with the combination of dependencies, which are considered as residuals. Our experiment reveals that when the closing price data for the previous 5 consecutive trading days is used as input, the performance of the model (ResNLS-5) is optimal compared to those with other inputs. Furthermore, ResNLS-5 demonstrates at least a 20% improvement over current state-of-the-art baselines. To verify whether ResNLS-5 can help clients effectively avoid risks and earn profits in the stock market, we construct a quantitative trading framework for back testing. The result shows that the trading strategy based on ResNLS-5 predictions can successfully mitigate losses during declining stock prices and generate profits in periods of rising stock prices.
Aug 1, 2021

Realised Volatility Forecasting: Machine Learning via Financial Word Embedding

We examine whether financial news can improve realised volatility forecasting using a parsimonious NLP-based framework that incorporates specialised financial word embeddings alongside general-purpose alternatives. News-only forecasts contain useful predictive information but generally do not outperform strong volatility-history benchmarks. Crucially, combining stock-related news forecasts with a strong volatility-history benchmark lowers forecast losses for several specifications and increases realised utility, providing evidence consistent with forecast complementarity. Performance varies across news types, embedding representations, and volatility regimes. SHAP attributions associate forecast variation with economically interpretable firm-specific and macroeconomic news themes.