Towards Non-Stationary Time Series Forecasting with Temporal Stabilization and Frequency Differencing

TL;DR

This paper introduces DTAF, a dual-branch framework that effectively handles non-stationarity in time series by addressing both temporal and spectral shifts, leading to improved forecasting accuracy in real-world applications.

Contribution

DTAF is a novel framework combining temporal stabilization and frequency differencing to enhance non-stationary time series forecasting.

Findings

DTAF outperforms existing methods on real-world benchmarks.

Significant improvements in forecasting accuracy under non-stationary conditions.

Effective disentanglement of temporal and spectral non-stationarity.

Abstract

Time series forecasting is critical for decision-making across dynamic domains such as energy, finance, transportation, and cloud computing. However, real-world time series often exhibit non-stationarity, including temporal distribution shifts and spectral variability, which pose significant challenges for long-term time series forecasting. In this paper, we propose DTAF, a dual-branch framework that addresses non-stationarity in both the temporal and frequency domains. For the temporal domain, the Temporal Stabilizing Fusion (TFS) module employs a non-stationary mix of experts (MOE) filter to disentangle and suppress temporal non-stationary patterns while preserving long-term dependencies. For the frequency domain, the Frequency Wave Modeling (FWM) module applies frequency differencing to dynamically highlight components with significant spectral shifts. By fusing the complementary outputs of TFS and FWM, DTAF generates robust forecasts that adapt to both temporal and frequency domain non-stationarity. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DTAF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding significant improvements in forecasting accuracy under non-stationary conditions. All codes are available at https://github.com/decisionintelligence/DTAF.