提出一种降低预测波动的序列分叉架构,提升时间序列预测可信度。
Forking-Sequences: Statistically and Computationally Efficient Multi-Horizon Forecasting with Reduced Volatility
- 采用序列分叉设计,在一次前向传播中生成多时序预测网格。
- 相比基线方法,中位sCRPS提升最高达49.3%,预测波动降低超10%。
- 适合需要稳定预测结果的金融、供应链等场景,尤其关注决策可靠性。
尽管准确性是时间序列预测的关键要求,但预测修订的合理波动性同样重要。即使高精度模型也可能在不同预测创建日期(FCD)间产生剧烈波动,破坏信任并干扰下游决策。为改善预测波动性,当前先进模型如MQCNN、MQT和SPADE采用了一种强大但未被充分探索的神经网络结构:序列分叉。该结构联合编码和解码所有FCD的完整时间序列,单次前向传播即可生成整个多时程预测网格。这与传统方法独立处理每个FCD形成对比。本文正式化序列分叉设计,通过引入量化预测修订超额波动的指标,并提供理论与实证分析,论证其三大优势:(i) 通过集成降低预测波动;(ii) 减少梯度方差,提升训练统计效率;(iii) 提升推理计算效率。在M系列基准上验证,使用来自M1、M3、M4和Tourism竞赛的16个数据集,结果显示各模型的中位sCRPS分别提升46.2%、49.3%、28.6%、24.7%和6.4%(对应RNN、LSTM、CNN、Transformer和状态空间模型)。进一步证明,推理阶段集成可使预测波动降低13.2%至11.2%,同时保持准确性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While accuracy is a critical requirement for time series forecasting, an equally important desideratum is reasonable forecast volatility across forecast creation dates (FCDs). Even highly accurate models can produce erratic revisions between FCDs, undermining trust and disrupting downstream decision-making. To improve the volatility of forecast revisions, state-of-the-art models like MQCNN, MQT, and SPADE employ a powerful yet underexplored neural network architectural design: forking-sequences. This architectural design jointly encodes and decodes the entire time series across all FCDs, producing an entire multi-horizon forecast grid in a single forward pass. This approach contrasts with conventional neural forecasting methods that process FCDs independently, generating only a single multi-horizon forecast per forward pass. In this work, we formalize the forking-sequences design and motivate its broader adoption by introducing a metric for quantifying excess volatility in forecast revisions and by providing theoretical and empirical analysis. We theoretically motivate three key benefits of forking-sequences: (i) reduced forecast volatility through ensembling; (ii) gradient variance reduction, improving the statistical efficiency of the training procedure; and (iii) improved inference computational efficiency. We validate the benefits of forking-sequences compared to baseline window-sampling on the M-series benchmark, using 16 datasets from the M1, M3, M4, and Tourism competitions. We observe median sCRPS improvements across datasets of 46.2%, 49.3%, 28.6%, 24.7%, and 6.4% for RNN, LSTM, CNN, Transformer, and State Space-based architectures, respectively. We then show that forecast ensembling during inference can reduce median forecast volatility by 13.2%, 13.0%, 10.9%, 10.2%, and 11.2% for these respective models trained with forking-sequences, while maintaining accuracy.
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