arXiv subjects

Wesley M. Gifford

Publications and source records attributed to Wesley M. Gifford.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Adaptive Conformal Anomaly Detection with Time Series Foundation Models for Signal Monitoring

We propose a post-hoc adaptive conformal anomaly detection method for monitoring time series that leverages predictions from pre-trained foundation models without requiring additional fine-tuning. Our method yields an interpretable anomaly score directly interpretable as a false alarm rate (p-value), facilitating transparent and actionable decision-making. It employs weighted quantile conformal prediction bounds and adaptively learns optimal weighting parameters from past predictions, enabling calibration under distribution shifts and stable false alarm control, while preserving out-of-sample guarantees. As a model-agnostic solution, it integrates seamlessly with foundation models and supports rapid deployment in resource-constrained environments. This approach addresses key industrial challenges such as limited data availability, lack of training expertise, and the need for immediate inference, while taking advantage of the growing accessibility of time series foundation models. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach delivers strong performance, combining simplicity, interpretability, robustness, and adaptivity.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

TSPulse: Tiny Pre-Trained Models with Disentangled Representations for Rapid Time-Series Analysis

Time-series tasks often benefit from signals expressed across multiple representation spaces (e.g., time vs. frequency) and at varying abstraction levels (e.g., local patterns vs. global semantics). However, existing pre-trained time-series models entangle these heterogeneous signals into a single large embedding, limiting transferability and direct zero-shot usability. To address this, we propose TSPulse, family of ultra-light pre-trained models (1M parameters) with disentanglement properties, specialized for various time-series diagnostic tasks. TSPulse introduces a novel pre-training framework that augments masked reconstruction with explicit disentanglement across spaces and abstractions, learning three complementary embedding views (temporal, spectral, and semantic) to effectively enable zero-shot transfer. In-addition, we introduce various lightweight post-hoc fusers that selectively attend and fuse these disentangled views based on task type, enabling simple but effective task specializations. To further improve robustness and mitigate mask-induced bias prevalent in existing approaches, we propose a simple yet effective hybrid masking strategy that enhances missing diversity during pre-training. Despite its compact size, TSPulse achieves strong and consistent gains across four TS diagnostic tasks: +20% on the TSB-AD anomaly detection leaderboard, +25% on similarity search, +50% on imputation, and +5-16% on multivariate classification, outperforming models that are 10-100X larger on over 75 datasets. TSPulse delivers state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, efficient fine-tuning, and supports GPU-free deployment. Models and source code are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-timeseries-tspulse-r1.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Revisiting the Generic Transformer: Deconstructing a Strong Baseline for Time Series Foundation Models

The recent surge in Time Series Foundation Models has rapidly advanced the field, yet the heterogeneous training setups across studies make it difficult to attribute improvements to architectural innovations versus data engineering. In this work, we investigate the potential of a standard patch Transformer, demonstrating that this generic architecture achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot forecasting performance using a straightforward training protocol. We conduct a comprehensive ablation study that covers model scaling, data composition, and training techniques to isolate the essential ingredients for high performance. Our findings identify the key drivers of performance, while confirming that the generic architecture itself demonstrates excellent scalability. By strictly controlling these variables, we provide comprehensive empirical results on model scaling across multiple dimensions. We release our open-source model and detailed findings to establish a transparent, reproducible baseline for future research.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Tiny Time Mixers (TTMs): Fast Pre-trained Models for Enhanced Zero/Few-Shot Forecasting of Multivariate Time Series

Large pre-trained models excel in zero/few-shot learning for language and vision tasks but face challenges in multivariate time series (TS) forecasting due to diverse data characteristics. Consequently, recent research efforts have focused on developing pre-trained TS forecasting models. These models, whether built from scratch or adapted from large language models (LLMs), excel in zero/few-shot forecasting tasks. However, they are limited by slow performance, high computational demands, and neglect of cross-channel and exogenous correlations. To address this, we introduce Tiny Time Mixers (TTM), a compact model (starting from 1M parameters) with effective transfer learning capabilities, trained exclusively on public TS datasets. TTM, based on the light-weight TSMixer architecture, incorporates innovations like adaptive patching, diverse resolution sampling, and resolution prefix tuning to handle pre-training on varied dataset resolutions with minimal model capacity. Additionally, it employs multi-level modeling to capture channel correlations and infuse exogenous signals during fine-tuning. TTM outperforms existing popular benchmarks in zero/few-shot forecasting by (4-40%), while reducing computational requirements significantly. Moreover, TTMs are lightweight and can be executed even on CPU-only machines, enhancing usability and fostering wider adoption in resource-constrained environments. The model weights for reproducibility and research use are available at https://huggingface.co/ibm/ttm-research-r2/, while enterprise-use weights under the Apache license can be accessed as follows: the initial TTM-Q variant at https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-timeseries-ttm-r1, and the latest variants (TTM-B, TTM-E, TTM-A) weights are available at https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-timeseries-ttm-r2.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Cascading Failure Prediction via Causal Inference

Causal inference provides an analytical framework to identify and quantify cause-and-effect relationships among a network of interacting agents. This paper offers a novel framework for analyzing cascading failures in power transmission networks. This framework generates a directed latent graph in which the nodes represent the transmission lines and the directed edges encode the cause-effect relationships. This graph has a structure distinct from the system's topology, signifying the intricate fact that both local and non-local interdependencies exist among transmission lines, which are more general than only the local interdependencies that topological graphs can present. This paper formalizes a causal inference framework for predicting how an emerging anomaly propagates throughout the system. Using this framework, two algorithms are designed, providing an analytical framework to identify the most likely and most costly cascading scenarios. The framework's effectiveness is evaluated compared to the pertinent literature on the IEEE 14-bus, 39-bus, and 118-bus systems.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Hierarchical Proxy Modeling for Improved HPO in Time Series Forecasting

Selecting the right set of hyperparameters is crucial in time series forecasting. The classical temporal cross-validation framework for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) often leads to poor test performance because of a possible mismatch between validation and test periods. To address this test-validation mismatch, we propose a novel technique, H-Pro to drive HPO via test proxies by exploiting data hierarchies often associated with time series datasets. Since higher-level aggregated time series often show less irregularity and better predictability as compared to the lowest-level time series which can be sparse and intermittent, we optimize the hyperparameters of the lowest-level base-forecaster by leveraging the proxy forecasts for the test period generated from the forecasters at higher levels. H-Pro can be applied on any off-the-shelf machine learning model to perform HPO. We validate the efficacy of our technique with extensive empirical evaluation on five publicly available hierarchical forecasting datasets. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in Tourism, Wiki, and Traffic datasets, and achieves competitive result in Tourism-L dataset, without any model-specific enhancements. Moreover, our method outperforms the winning method of the M5 forecast accuracy competition.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Generative Adversarial Network for Probabilistic Forecast of Random Dynamical System

We present a deep learning model for data-driven simulations of random dynamical systems without a distributional assumption. The deep learning model consists of a recurrent neural network, which aims to learn the time marching structure, and a generative adversarial network (GAN) to learn and sample from the probability distribution of the random dynamical system. Although GANs provide a powerful tool to model a complex probability distribution, the training often fails without a proper regularization. Here, we propose a regularization strategy for a GAN based on consistency conditions for the sequential inference problems. First, the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is used to enforce the consistency between conditional and marginal distributions of a stochastic process. Then, the marginal distributions of the multiple-step predictions are regularized by using MMD or from multiple discriminators. The behavior of the proposed model is studied by using three stochastic processes with complex noise structures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

AutoAI-TS: AutoAI for Time Series Forecasting

A large number of time series forecasting models including traditional statistical models, machine learning models and more recently deep learning have been proposed in the literature. However, choosing the right model along with good parameter values that performs well on a given data is still challenging. Automatically providing a good set of models to users for a given dataset saves both time and effort from using trial-and-error approaches with a wide variety of available models along with parameter optimization. We present AutoAI for Time Series Forecasting (AutoAI-TS) that provides users with a zero configuration (zero-conf ) system to efficiently train, optimize and choose best forecasting model among various classes of models for the given dataset. With its flexible zero-conf design, AutoAI-TS automatically performs all the data preparation, model creation, parameter optimization, training and model selection for users and provides a trained model that is ready to use. For given data, AutoAI-TS utilizes a wide variety of models including classical statistical models, Machine Learning (ML) models, statistical-ML hybrid models and deep learning models along with various transformations to create forecasting pipelines. It then evaluates and ranks pipelines using the proposed T-Daub mechanism to choose the best pipeline. The paper describe in detail all the technical aspects of AutoAI-TS along with extensive benchmarking on a variety of real world data sets for various use-cases. Benchmark results show that AutoAI-TS, with no manual configuration from the user, automatically trains and selects pipelines that on average outperform existing state-of-the-art time series forecasting toolkits.

cs.LG↗