The use of residential photovoltaics has increased dramatically in recent years. With battery systems becoming more affordable, the optimal operation of a photovoltaic-battery system can bring significant savings to households. Optimal control requires correct forecasts of underlying parameters, such as photovoltaic power generation, to schedule the battery. While forecasting models have become increasingly accurate due to algorithmic advances and data availability, accuracy is typically measured in generic metrics which might not align with the downstream application. This study proposes a decision-focused learning framework that integrates optimization and prediction by training a Long Short-Term Memory photovoltaic energy forecaster on the downstream optimal scheduling of a battery system. The proposed methodology is compared against a standard two-phase approach. Across a 14-month evaluation period, the decision-focused method reduced average electricity costs across twenty buildings by 3.6% when normalized against performance bounds defined by a perfect forecast and a baseline of no optimization. Critically, this financial improvement was achieved despite the model exhibiting a root mean squared error of 19.9%, significantly higher than the decoupled model's 8.2%. Warm-starting the decision-focused model further improves results, lowering average cost by approximately 8%, while also mitigating the negative impact on statistical accuracy (root mean squared error of 13.7%). The findings are statistically significant at the 0.001 level across the twenty households and for each household individually. These results demonstrate that aligning forecast models with optimization goals is key for achieving cost advantages in PV-battery systems. Future research should replicate these findings on other datasets, alternate forecasting models and alternate optimization algorithms.

Time series forecasting models often exhibit inconsistent performance across datasets with varying statistical and structural properties. Despite the wide range of available forecasting techniques, it remains unclear whether model selection can be reliably guided by simple data characteristics. This paper investigates why rule-based model selection fails in time series forecasting by analyzing the relationship between data-regime descriptors and model performance. A descriptor-based framework is introduced to characterize time series using measurable properties, including trend strength, seasonality, noise level, and temporal dependence. Based on these descriptors, a rule-based selection mechanism is formulated to map data regimes to candidate forecasting models. The approach is evaluated on multiple real-world datasets across different domains and forecasting horizons. The results show that rule-based model selection achieves low accuracy, with correct model identification occurring in only a small fraction of cases. Significant discrepancies are observed between recommended and empirically optimal models, particularly in noisy and mixed regimes. Further analysis reveals that model performance is highly sensitive to both dataset characteristics and forecasting horizon, resulting in substantial ranking instability across scenarios. These findings explain why simple heuristic rules fail to generalize and demonstrate that forecasting performance cannot be reliably predicted using static, descriptor-based approaches. This study provides empirical evidence that model selection in time series forecasting is inherently context-dependent and highlights the need for more adaptive, data-driven strategies.

Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting is a fundamental task with numerous real-world applications, such as transportation, climate, and epidemiology. While a myriad of powerful deep learning models have been developed for this task, few works have explored the robustness of MTS forecasting models to malicious attacks, which is crucial for their trustworthy employment in high-stake scenarios. To address this gap, we dive deep into the backdoor attacks on MTS forecasting models and propose an effective attack method named BackTime. By subtly injecting a few \textit{stealthy triggers} into the MTS data, BackTime can alter the predictions of the forecasting model according to the attacker's intent. Specifically, BackTime first identifies vulnerable timestamps in the data for poisoning, and then adaptively synthesizes stealthy and effective triggers by solving a bi-level optimization problem with a GNN-based trigger generator. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and state-of-the-art MTS forecasting models demonstrate the effectiveness, versatility, and stealthiness of BackTime attacks.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently achieved remarkable advancements in time series forecasting (TSF) due to their powerful ability of sequence dependence modeling. To date, existing DNN-based TSF methods still suffer from unreliable predictions for real-world data due to its non-stationarity characteristics, i.e., data distribution varies quickly over time. To mitigate this issue, several normalization methods (e.g., SAN) have recently been specifically designed by normalization in a fixed period/window in the time domain. However, these methods still struggle to capture distribution variations, due to the complex time patterns of time series in the time domain. Based on the fact that wavelet transform can decompose time series into a linear combination of different frequencies, which exhibits distribution variations with time-varying periods, we propose a novel Dual-domain Dynamic Normalization (DDN) to dynamically capture distribution variations in both time and frequency domains. Specifically, our DDN tries to eliminate the non-stationarity of time series via both frequency and time domain normalization in a sliding window way. Besides, our DDN can serve as a plug-in-play module, and thus can be easily incorporated into other forecasting models. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets under different forecasting models demonstrate the superiority of our DDN over other normalization methods. Code will be made available following the review process.

Lasso performance, with the added benefit of providing multiple solutions.

Unlike traditional backdoor attacks that focus on specific class labels, our approach aims to induce poisoned models to predict future data as a predefined target pattern.

Accurately modeling the correlation structure of errors is critical for reliable uncertainty quantification in probabilistic time series forecasting.

Building upon Miller's framework of explanations derived from research in multiple