Time series prediction underpins a broad range of downstream tasks across many scientific domains. Recent advances and increasing adoption of black-box machine learning models for time series prediction highlight the critical need for reliable uncertainty quantification. While conformal prediction has gained attention as a reliable uncertainty quantification method, conformal prediction for time series faces two key challenges: (1) adaptively leveraging correlations in features and non-conformity scores to overcome the exchangeability assumption, and (2) constructing prediction sets for multi-dimensional outcomes. To address these challenges jointly, we propose a novel conformal prediction method for time series using flow with classifier-free guidance. We provide coverage guarantees by establishing exact non-asymptotic marginal coverage and a finite-sample bound on conditional coverage for the proposed method. Evaluations on real-world time series datasets demonstrate that our method constructs significantly smaller prediction sets than existing conformal prediction methods while maintaining target coverage.
翻译:时间序列预测支撑着众多科学领域中的广泛下游任务。近年来,黑盒机器学习模型在时间序列预测中的进展与日益普及突显了可靠不确定性量化的关键需求。尽管保形预测作为一种可靠的不确定性量化方法已受到关注,但时间序列的保形预测面临两大挑战:(1) 自适应利用特征与非一致性分数间的相关性以克服可交换性假设,(2) 为多维输出构建预测集。为协同解决这些挑战,我们提出了一种基于流与无分类器引导的新型时间序列保形预测方法。通过建立精确的非渐近边际覆盖性及所提方法条件覆盖性的有限样本界,我们提供了覆盖性保证。在真实世界时间序列数据集上的评估表明,本方法在保持目标覆盖率的同时,构建的预测集显著小于现有保形预测方法。