Title: Reviving Error Correction in Modern Deep Time-Series Forecasting
Primary area: learning on time series and dynamical systems
Keywords: time-series forecasting, deep learning

Abstract: Modern deep-learning models have achieved remarkable success in time-series forecasting. Yet, their performance degrades in long-term prediction due to error accumulation in autoregressive inference, where predictions are recursively used as inputs. While classical error correction mechanisms (ECMs) have long been used in statistical methods, their applicability to deep learning models remains limited or ineffective. In this work, we revisit the error accumulation problem in deep time-series forecasting and investigate the role and necessity of ECMs in this new context. We propose a simple, architecture-agnostic error correction model that can be integrated with any existing forecaster without requiring retraining. By explicitly decomposing predictions into trend and seasonal components and training the corrector to adjust each separately, we introduce the Universal Error Corrector with Seasonal–Trend Decomposition (UEC-STD), which significantly improves correction accuracy and robustness across diverse backbones and datasets. Our findings provide a practical tool for enhancing forecasts while offering new insights into mitigating autoregressive errors in deep time-series models.

TL;DR: We propose a simple, architecture-agnostic error correction model that can be integrated with any existing forecaster without requiring retraining.