Learning Pattern-Specific Experts for Time Series Forecasting Under Patch-level Distribution Shift

TL;DR

The paper introduces TFPS, a pattern-specific expert framework for time series forecasting that dynamically adapts to distribution shifts across data patches, significantly improving accuracy over existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel architecture combining dual-domain encoding, subspace clustering, and pattern-specific experts to handle complex distribution shifts in time series data.

Findings

TFPS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in real-world datasets.

It achieves better long-term forecasting accuracy.

The approach effectively models evolving patterns across data patches.

Abstract

Time series forecasting, which aims to predict future values based on historical data, has garnered significant attention due to its broad range of applications. However, real-world time series often exhibit complex non-uniform distribution with varying patterns across segments, such as season, operating condition, or semantic meaning, making accurate forecasting challenging. Existing approaches, which typically train a single model to capture all these diverse patterns, often struggle with the pattern drifts between patches and may lead to poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose TFPS, a novel architecture that leverages pattern-specific experts for more accurate and adaptable time series forecasting. TFPS employs a dual-domain encoder to capture both time-domain and frequency-domain features, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of temporal dynamics. It then uses subspace clustering to dynamically identify distinct patterns across data patches. Finally, pattern-specific experts model these unique patterns, delivering tailored predictions for each patch. By explicitly learning and adapting to evolving patterns, TFPS achieves significantly improved forecasting accuracy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TFPS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in long-term forecasting, through its dynamic and pattern-aware learning approach. The data and codes are available: https://github.com/syrGitHub/TFPS.