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TimeLAVA: Learning-Agnostic Valuation for Time Series Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Data valuation quantifies the intrinsic quality of individual samples to enable principled data curation, quality control, and robust learning. For time series in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and industrial monitoring, effective valuation methods are essential yet fundamentally lacking. Existing approaches are either model-dependent, limiting their generalizability, or designed for i.i.d. data and thus fail to capture temporal dependencies, multi-scale patterns, and non-stationary dynamics inherent to sequential data. We introduce TimeLAVA, a learning-agnostic framework that values temporal segments by their marginal contribution to minimizing distributional discrepancy between evaluated and reference data. At its core is a novel Selective Wavelet-based Wasserstein discrepancy combining multi-scale wavelet transforms for temporal localization with unbalanced optimal transport for robustness to distributional shifts. Segment values are efficiently computed via sensitivity analysis without requiring model training and aggregated into point-wise scores. We provide theoretical guarantees linking valuation to model-agnostic generalization and prove bounded sensitivity to outlier contamination. Extensive experiments across anomaly detection, data pruning, and label noise detection demonstrate that TimeLAVA produces significantly more informative value scores than existing methods on diverse real-world datasets.


Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection with Idempotent Reconstruction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reconstruction-based methods are competitive choices for multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD). However, one challenge these methods may suffer is over generalization, where abnormal inputs are also well reconstructed. In addition, balancing robustness and sensitivity is also important for final performance, as robustness ensures accurate detection in potentially noisy data, while sensitivity enables early detection of subtle anomalies. To address these problems, inspired by idempotent generative network, we take the view from the manifold and propose a novel module named Idempotent Generation for Anomaly Detection (IGAD) which can be flexibly combined with a reconstruction-based method without introducing additional trainable parameters. We modify the manifold to make sure that normal time points can be mapped onto it while tightening it to drop out abnormal time points simultaneously. Regarding the latest findings of AD metrics, we evaluated IGAD on various methods with four realworld datasets, and they achieve visible improvements in VUS-PR than their predecessors, demonstrating the effective potential of IGAD for further improvements in MTSAD tasks. Our instructions on integrating IGAD into customized models and example codes are available at https://github.com/ProEcho1/


AGeometry-Aware Metric for Mode Collapse in Time Series Generative Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and diffusion models often suffer from mode collapse, failing to reproduce the full diversity of their training data. While this problem has been extensively studied in image generation, it remains largely unaddressed for time series. We introduce a formal definition of mode collapse for time series and propose DMD-GEN, a geometry-aware metric that quantifies its severity. DMD-GEN leverages Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) to extract coherent temporal structures and uses Optimal Transport between DMD eigenvectors to measure discrepancies in underlying dynamics. By representing the subspaces spanned by the DMD eigenvectors as point structures on a Grassmann manifold, and comparing them via Wasserstein distances computed from principal angles, DMD-GEN enables a principled geometric comparison between real and generated sequences. The metric is efficient, requiring no additional training, supports minibatch evaluation, and is easily parallelizable. Beyond quantification, DMD-GEN offers interpretability by revealing which dynamical modes are distorted or missing in the generated data.


Functional Virtual Adversarial Training for Semi-Supervised Time Series Classification

Neural Information Processing Systems

Real-world time series analysis, such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and solar energy, faces unique challenges arising from the scarcity of labeled data, highlighting the need for effective semi-supervised learning methods. While the Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) method has shown promising performance in leveraging unlabeled data for smoother predictive distributions, straightforward extensions of VAT often fall short on time series tasks as they neglect the temporal structure of the data in the adversarial perturbation. In this paper, we propose the framework of functional Virtual Adversarial Training (f-VAT) that can incorporate the functional structure of the data into perturbations. By theoretically establishing a duality between the perturbation norm and the functional model sensitivity, we propose to use an appropriate Sobolev (H s) norm to generate structured functional adversarial perturbations for semi-supervised time series classification. Our proposed f-VAT method outperforms recent methods and achieves superior performance in extensive semi-supervised time series classification tasks (e.g., up to 9% performance improvement). We also provide additional visualization studies to offer further insights into the superiority of f-VAT.



Meta Guidance: Incorporating Inductive Biases into Deep Time Series Imputers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Missing values, frequently encountered in time series data, can significantly impair the effectiveness of analytical methods. While deep imputation models have emerged as the predominant approach due to their superior performance, explicitly incorporating inductive biases aligned with time-series characteristics offers substantial improvement potential. Taking advantage of non-stationarity and periodicity in time series, two domain-specific inductive biases are designed: (1) Non-Stationary Guidance, which operationalizes the proximity principle to address highly non-stationary series by emphasizing temporal neighbors, and (2) Periodic Guidance, which exploits periodicity patterns through learnable weight allocation across historical periods. Building upon these complementary mechanisms, the overall module, named Meta Guidance, dynamically fuses both guidances through data-adaptive weights learned from the specific input sample. Experiments on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that integrating Meta Guidance into existing deep imputation architectures achieves an average 27.39% reduction in imputation error compared to state-of-the-art baselines.



Disease Trajectory Maps

Neural Information Processing Systems

Medical researchers are coming to appreciate that many diseases are in fact complex, heterogeneous syndromes composed of subpopulations that express different variants of a related complication. Longitudinal data extracted from individual electronic health records (EHR) offer an exciting new way to study subtle differences in the way these diseases progress over time. In this paper, we focus on answering two questions that can be asked using these databases of longitudinal EHR data. First, we want to understand whether there are individuals with similar disease trajectories and whether there are a small number of degrees of freedom that account for differences in trajectories across the population. Second, we want to understand how important clinical outcomes are associated with disease trajectories. To answer these questions, we propose the Disease Trajectory Map (DTM), a novel probabilistic model that learns low-dimensional representations of sparse and irregularly sampled longitudinal data. We propose a stochastic variational inference algorithm for learning the DTM that allows the model to scale to large modern medical datasets. To demonstrate the DTM, we analyze data collected on patients with the complex autoimmune disease, scleroderma. We find that DTM learns meaningful representations of disease trajectories and that the representations are significantly associated with important clinical outcomes.



Inference via Interpolation: Contrastive Representations Provably Enable Planning and Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

Given time series data, how can we answer questions like how did we get here?'' These sorts of probabilistic inference questions are challenging when observations are high-dimensional. In this paper, we show how these questions can have compact, closed form solutions in terms of learned representations. The key idea is to apply a variant of contrastive learning to time series data. Prior work already shows that the representations learned by contrastive learning encode a probability ratio. By extending prior work to show that the marginal distribution over representations is Gaussian, we can then prove that joint distribution of representations is also Gaussian. Taken together, these results show that representations learned via temporal contrastive learning follow a Gauss-Markov chain, a graphical model where inference (e.g., prediction, planning) over representations corresponds to inverting a low-dimensional matrix. In one special case, inferring intermediate representations will be equivalent to interpolating between the learned representations.