Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.31288

DISC: Domain-Integrated Similarity Cost for Time-Series Dataset

Abstract

The growth of time-series datasets and foundation models has made dataset comparison a central part of time-series workflows. Assessing source-target transfer before model adaptation requires similarity estimates that can summarize transfer-related dataset relationships without exhaustive source-target evaluation over every candidate pair. Many metrics have been proposed for measuring similarity between time-series datasets, but they capture different dataset relationships and vary in how well they align with downstream utility across tasks. We evaluate this gap by measuring the correlation between source-target similarity scores and downstream forecasting errors in out-of-distribution and transfer-learning settings. We propose Domain-Integrated Similarity Cost (DISC), a learnable aggregation framework that uses calibration transfer observations to select, weight, and combine similarity metrics for different downstream tasks. By integrating complementary metric values, DISC better distinguishes source-target dataset differences that matter for downstream behavior. After calibration, DISC scores source-target pairs using only their similarity-metric values and yields higher alignment than single-metric references on the reported split. These results show that time-series dataset similarity is task-dependent, and that learned metric integration provides a stronger proxy for downstream transfer behavior than manually selecting one similarity metric.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Yen-Ku Liu, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan Rossi. 2026-10-22. DISC: Domain-Integrated Similarity Cost for Time-Series Dataset. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31288

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Are EEG Sequences Time Series? EEG Classification with Time Series Models and Joint Subject Training

As with most other data domains, EEG data analysis relies on rich domain-specific preprocessing. Beyond such preprocessing, machine learners would hope to deal with such data as with any other time series data. For EEG classification many models have been developed with layer types and architectures we typically do not see in time series classification. Furthermore, typically separate models for each individual subject are learned, not one model for all of them. In this paper, we systematically study the differences between EEG classification models and generic time series classification models. We describe three different model setups to deal with EEG data from different subjects, subject-specific models (most EEG literature), subject-agnostic models and subject-conditional models. In experiments on three datasets, we demonstrate that off-the-shelf time series classification models trained per subject perform close to EEG classification models, but that do not quite reach the performance of domain-specific modeling. Additionally, we combine time-series models with subject embeddings to train one joint subject-conditional classifier on all subjects. The resulting models are competitive with dedicated EEG models in 2 out of 3 datasets, even outperforming all EEG methods on one of them.

cs.LG↗

The Fenchel-Young Generalization of Bayesian Principles

Conjugate Bayes plays a key role in machine learning, ensuring computationally simple posterior updates. We generalize the variational principle behind this computation by using the Fenchel-Young (FY) inequality, which lets us define a generalized evidence lower bound beyond the KL geometry, and at equality, characterizes new generalized posteriors. A generalized notion of conjugacy follows, defined as closure of prior-potential families that are affine under translation by the loss. We show that such families not only preserve additive canonical updating, but also posterior inference with parameter-dependent supports and tuneably heavy tails. This combination is not feasible with standard conjugate Bayes. We derive a new FY generalization of expectation maximization (EM), which recovers classical and Hard EM, and amortized versions. We show examples, including generalized Bayesian linear regression with closed-form bounded support and heavy-tailed posteriors, and a Gaussian mixture with sparse cluster assignments.

cs.LG↗

Fragility-aware Classification for Risk Characterization and Robust Learning

Classification models play a central role in data-driven decision-making applications such as medical diagnosis, recommendation systems, and risk assessment. Traditional performance metrics, such as accuracy and AUC, quantify classification errors and pairwise ranking performance but do not account for the magnitude of errors, i.e., the risk of confident misjudgments. This limitation is particularly consequential in safety-critical and cost-sensitive settings, where overconfident errors can lead to severe outcomes. To address this issue, we propose the Fragility Index (FI), a novel performance metric that evaluates classifiers from a risk-averse perspective by capturing the tail risk of confident misjudgments. We formulate FI within a robust satisficing (RS) framework to quantify classifier sensitivity under distributional uncertainty. Building on this, we develop a tractable surrogate-based training framework and establish provable bounds connecting training fragility to ranking-error FI. We further derive tractable reformulations for a broad class of loss functions, including cross-entropy, hinge-type, and Lipschitz losses, and identify specific conditions under which these reformulations are exact. We also introduce an FI-induced regularizer for deep neural networks. Empirical results on real-world medical diagnosis tasks demonstrate that FI complements existing metrics by revealing error tail risk not reflected in accuracy or AUC. FI-based models achieve competitive predictive performance while generally attaining lower FI. In the simulated human--AI diagnostic workflow, they also achieve lower average operational costs than empirical risk minimization.

cs.LG↗