Intervention-Aware Forecasting: Breaking Historical Limits from a System Perspective
This work addresses the limitation of ignoring external interventions in forecasting for domains like finance or healthcare, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing control-theoretic analysis and focuses on textual data.
The paper tackles the problem of time series forecasting by addressing the neglect of external interventions in traditional methods, proposing an Intervention-Aware Time Series Forecasting (IATSF) framework that incorporates textual interventions, and shows that FIATS, a lightweight model implementing this framework, surpasses state-of-the-art methods in empirical evaluations.
Traditional time series forecasting methods predominantly rely on historical data patterns, neglecting external interventions that significantly shape future dynamics. Through control-theoretic analysis, we show that the implicit "self-stimulation" assumption limits the accuracy of these forecasts. To overcome this limitation, we propose an Intervention-Aware Time Series Forecasting (IATSF) framework explicitly designed to incorporate external interventions. We particularly emphasize textual interventions due to their unique capability to represent qualitative or uncertain influences inadequately captured by conventional exogenous variables. We propose a leak-free benchmark composed of temporally synchronized textual intervention data across synthetic and real-world scenarios. To rigorously evaluate IATSF, we develop FIATS, a lightweight forecasting model that integrates textual interventions through Channel-Aware Adaptive Sensitivity Modeling (CASM) and Channel-Aware Parameter Sharing (CAPS) mechanisms, enabling the model to adjust its sensitivity to interventions and historical data in a channel-specific manner. Extensive empirical evaluations confirm that FIATS surpasses state-of-the-art methods, highlighting that forecasting improvements stem explicitly from modeling external interventions rather than increased model complexity alone.