signature kernel
Scalable Signature Kernel Computations via Local Neumann Series Expansions
The signature kernel [10] is a recent state-of-the-art tool for analyzing highdimensional sequential data, valued for its theoretical guarantees and strong empirical performance. In this paper, we present a novel method for efficiently computing the signature kernel of long, high-dimensional time series via adaptively truncated recursive local power series expansions. Building on the characterization of the signature kernel as the solution of a Goursat PDE [17], our approach employs tilewise Neumann-series expansions to derive rapidly converging power series approximations of the signature kernel that are locally defined on subdomains and propagated iteratively across the entire domain of the Goursat solution by exploiting the geometry of the time series. Algorithmically, this involves solving a system of interdependent Goursat PDEs via adaptively truncated local power series expansions and recursive propagation of boundary conditions along a directed graph in a topological ordering.
Random Controlled Differential Equations
Piatti, Francesco, Cass, Thomas, Turner, William F.
We introduce a training-efficient framework for time-series learning that combines random features with controlled differential equations (CDEs). In this approach, large randomly parameterized CDEs act as continuous-time reservoirs, mapping input paths to rich representations. Only a linear readout layer is trained, resulting in fast, scalable models with strong inductive bias. Building on this foundation, we propose two variants: (i) Random Fourier CDEs (RF-CDEs): these lift the input signal using random Fourier features prior to the dynamics, providing a kernel-free approximation of RBF-enhanced sequence models; (ii) Random Rough DEs (R-RDEs): these operate directly on rough-path inputs via a log-ODE discretization, using log-signatures to capture higher-order temporal interactions while remaining stable and efficient. We prove that in the infinite-width limit, these model induces the RBF-lifted signature kernel and the rough signature kernel, respectively, offering a unified perspective on random-feature reservoirs, continuous-time deep architectures, and path-signature theory. We evaluate both models across a range of time-series benchmarks, demonstrating competitive or state-of-the-art performance. These methods provide a practical alternative to explicit signature computations, retaining their inductive bias while benefiting from the efficiency of random features.
Signature Kernel Scoring Rule as Spatio-Temporal Diagnostic for Probabilistic Forecasting
Dodson, Archer, Dutta, Ritabrata
Modern weather forecasting has increasingly transitioned from numerical weather prediction (NWP) to data-driven machine learning forecasting techniques. While these new models produce probabilistic forecasts to quantify uncertainty, their training and evaluation may remain hindered by conventional scoring rules, primarily MSE, which ignore the highly correlated data structures present in weather and atmospheric systems. This work introduces the signature kernel scoring rule, grounded in rough path theory, which reframes weather variables as continuous paths to encode temporal and spatial dependencies through iterated integrals. Validated as strictly proper through the use of path augmentations to guarantee uniqueness, the signature kernel provides a theoretically robust metric for forecast verification and model training. Empirical evaluations through weather scorecards on WeatherBench 2 models demonstrate the signature kernel scoring rule's high discriminative power and unique capacity to capture path-dependent interactions. Following previous demonstration of successful adversarial-free probabilistic training, we train sliding window generative neural networks using a predictive-sequential scoring rule on ERA5 reanalysis weather data. Using a lightweight model, we demonstrate that signature kernel based training outperforms climatology for forecast paths of up to fifteen timesteps.
pySigLib -- Fast Signature-Based Computations on CPU and GPU
Shmelev, Daniil, Salvi, Cristopher
Signature-based methods have recently gained significant traction in machine learning for sequential data. In particular, signature kernels have emerged as powerful discriminators and training losses for generative models on time-series, notably in quantitative finance. However, existing implementations do not scale to the dataset sizes and sequence lengths encountered in practice. We present pySigLib, a high-performance Python library offering optimised implementations of signatures and signature kernels on CPU and GPU, fully compatible with PyTorch's automatic differentiation. Beyond an efficient software stack for large-scale signature-based computation, we introduce a novel differentiation scheme for signature kernels that delivers accurate gradients at a fraction of the runtime of existing libraries.
Expected Signature Kernels for Lévy Rough Paths
Friz, Peter K., Hager, Paul P.
The expected signature kernel arises in statistical learning tasks as a similarity measure of probability measures on path space. Computing this kernel for known classes of stochastic processes is an important problem that, in particular, can help reduce computational costs. Building on the representation of the expected signature of (inhomogeneous) Lévy processes with absolutely continuous characteristics as the development of an absolutely continuous path in the extended tensor algebra [F.-H.-Tapia, Forum of Mathematics: Sigma (2022), "Unified signature cumulants and generalized Magnus expansions"], we extend the arguments developed for smooth rough paths in [Lemercier-Lyons-Salvi, "Log-PDE Methods for Rough Signature Kernels"] to derive a PDE system for the expected signature of inhomogeneous Lévy processes. As a specific example, we see that the expected signature kernel of Gaussian martingales satisfies a Goursat PDE.
Manifold-regularised Large-Margin $\ell_p$-SVDD for Multidimensional Time Series Anomaly Detection
We generalise the recently introduced large-margin $\ell_p$-SVDD approach to exploit the geometry of data distribution via manifold regularising for time series anomaly detection. Specifically, we formulate a manifold-regularised variant of the $\ell_p$-SVDD method to encourage label smoothness on the underlying manifold to capture structural information for improved detection performance. Drawing on an existing Representer theorem, we then provide an effective optimisation technique for the proposed method. We theoretically study the proposed approach using Rademacher complexities to analyse its generalisation performance and also provide an experimental assessment of the proposed method across various data sets to compare its performance against other methods.