AliO: Output Alignment Matters in Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF) tasks, which leverage the current data sequence as input to predict the future sequence, have become increasingly crucial in real-world applications such as weather forecasting and planning of electricity consumption. However, state-of-the-art LTSF models often fail to achieve prediction output alignment for the same timestamps across lagged input sequences. Instead, these models exhibit low output alignment, resulting in fluctuation in prediction outputs for the same timestamps, undermining the model's reliability. To address this, we propose AliO (Align Outputs), a novel approach designed to improve the output alignment of LTSF models by reducing the discrepancies between prediction outputs for the same timestamps in both the time and frequency domains. To measure output alignment, we introduce a new metric, TAM (Time Alignment Metric), which quantifies the alignment between prediction outputs, whereas existing metrics such as MSE only capture the distance between prediction outputs and ground truths. Experimental results show that AliO effectively improves the output alignment, i.e., up to 58.2\% in TAM, while maintaining or enhancing the forecasting performance (up to 27.5\%). This improved output alignment increases the reliability of the LTSF models, making them more applicable in real-world scenarios. The code implementation is on an anonymous GitHub repository.