arXiv:2512.03578cs.LGcs.AI2025-12

提出可解释时间序列回归模型,自动发现关键特征与时间节点。

When, How Long and How Much? Interpretable Neural Networks for Time Series Regression by Learning to Mask and Aggregate

  • 通过学习掩码聚合机制自动提取可读的时间模式
  • 预测结果由可解释概念线性组合而成,无黑箱决策过程
  • 无需人工标注即可识别影响预测的关键特征与时间点

时间序列外生回归(TSER)指从输入时间序列中预测连续目标变量的任务,广泛应用于医疗、金融、环境监测和工程等领域。尽管当前先进模型预测性能强,但多为黑箱,难以理解其决策依据。后处理可解释性方法常产生粗糙或不稳定的解释。近期的内在可解释方法虽有潜力,但需概念标注,难捕捉特征间交互,表达能力有限,且难以扩展至高维多变量数据。为此,本文提出MAGNETS(Mask-and-AGgregate NEtwork for Time Series),一种内在可解释的神经架构。MAGNETS无需标注即可学习一组人类可理解的概念,每个概念对应对选定输入特征的掩码式聚合,明确揭示哪些特征在何时驱动预测。预测通过透明的加法结构组合这些概念形成,实现决策过程的清晰洞察。代码与数据集已公开于https://github.com/FlorentF9/MAGNETS。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Time series extrinsic regression (TSER) refers to the task of predicting a continuous target variable from an input time series. It appears in many domains, including healthcare, finance, environmental monitoring, and engineering. In these settings, accurate predictions and trustworthy reasoning are both essential. Although state-of-the-art TSER models achieve strong predictive performance, they typically operate as black boxes, making it difficult to understand which temporal patterns drive their decisions. Post-hoc interpretability techniques, such as feature attribution, aim to to explain how the model arrives at its predictions, but often produce coarse, noisy, or unstable explanations. Recently, inherently interpretable approaches based on concepts, additive decompositions, or symbolic regression, have emerged as promising alternatives. However, these approaches remain limited: they require explicit supervision on the concepts themselves, often cannot capture interactions between time-series features, lack expressiveness for complex temporal patterns, and struggle to scale to high-dimensional multivariate data. To address these limitations, we propose MAGNETS (Mask-and-AGgregate NEtwork for Time Series), an inherently interpretable neural architecture for TSER. MAGNETS learns a compact set of human-understandable concepts without requiring any annotations. Each concept corresponds to a learned, mask-based aggregation over selected input features, explicitly revealing both which features drive predictions and when they matter in the sequence. Predictions are formed as combinations of these learned concepts through a transparent, additive structure, enabling clear insight into the model's decision process. The code implementation and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/FlorentF9/MAGNETS.

时间序列可解释性神经网络特征选择

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