Weakly Guided Adaptation for Robust Time Series Forecasting

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Abstract

Robust multivariate time series forecasting is crucial in many cyber-physical and Internet of Things applications. Existing state-of-the-art robust forecasting models decompose time series into independent functions covering trends and periodicities. However, these independent functions fail to capture correlations among multiple time series, thereby reducing prediction accuracy. Moreover, existing robust forecasting models treat certain abrupt but normal changes, e.g., caused by holidays, as outliers because they occur infrequently and have data distributions that resemble those of outliers. This exacerbates model bias and reduces prediction accuracy. This paper aims to capture correlations across multiple time series and abrupt but normal changes, thereby improving prediction accuracy. We employ weak labels to partition the dataset into source and target domains. Then, we propose the Domain Adversarial Robust Forecaster (DARF). This forecasting model is based on adversarial domain adaptation and includes two novel modules: Correlated Robust Forecaster (CORF) and Domain Critic. Specifically, CORF constitutes an encoder-decoder framework proficient at robust multivariate time series forecasting, and Domain Critic works to reduce data bias. Extensive experiments and discussions show that DARF is capable of state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy.