Yuhong Fu

Fei Wang, Yujie Li, Zezhi Shao et al.

Recent advancements in deep learning models for time series forecasting have been significant. These models often leverage fundamental time series properties such as seasonality and non-stationarity, which may suggest an intrinsic link between model performance and data properties. However, existing benchmark datasets fail to offer diverse and well-defined temporal patterns, restricting the systematic evaluation of such connections. Additionally, there is no effective model recommendation approach, leading to high time and cost expenditures when testing different architectures across different downstream applications. For those reasons, we propose ARIES, a framework for assessing relation between time series properties and modeling strategies, and for recommending deep forcasting models for realistic time series. First, we construct a synthetic dataset with multiple distinct patterns, and design a comprehensive system to compute the properties of time series. Next, we conduct an extensive benchmarking of over 50 forecasting models, and establish the relationship between time series properties and modeling strategies. Our experimental results reveal a clear correlation. Based on these findings, we propose the first deep forecasting model recommender, capable of providing interpretable suggestions for real-world time series. In summary, ARIES is the first study to establish the relations between the properties of time series data and modeling strategies, while also implementing a model recommendation system. The code is available at: https://github.com/blisky-li/ARIES.

Yujie Li, Zezhi Shao, Chengqing Yu et al.

Time series forecasting under distribution shift remains challenging, as existing deep learning models often rely on local statistical normalization (e.g., mean and variance) that fails to capture global distribution shift. Methods like RevIN and its variants attempt to decouple distribution and pattern but still struggle with missing values, noisy observations, and invalid channel-wise affine transformation. To address these limitations, we propose Affine Prototype Timestamp (APT), a lightweight and flexible plug-in module that injects global distribution features into the normalization-forecasting pipeline. By leveraging timestamp conditioned prototype learning, APT dynamically generates affine parameters that modulate both input and output series, enabling the backbone to learn from self-supervised, distribution-aware clustered instances. APT is compatible with arbitrary forecasting backbones and normalization strategies while introducing minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments across six benchmark datasets and multiple backbone-normalization combinations demonstrate that APT significantly improves forecasting performance under distribution shift.