English

Flow-based Conformal Prediction for Multi-dimensional Time Series

Machine Learning 2026-03-23 v3 Machine Learning

Abstract

Time series prediction underpins a broad range of downstream tasks across many scientific domains. Recent advances and increasing adoption of black-box machine learning models for time series prediction highlight the critical need for uncertainty quantification. While conformal prediction has gained attention as a reliable uncertainty quantification method, conformal prediction for time series faces two key challenges: (1) \textbf{leveraging correlations in observations and non-conformity scores to overcome the exchangeability assumption}, and (2) \textbf{constructing prediction sets for multi-dimensional outcomes}. To address these challenges, we propose a novel conformal prediction method for time series using flow with classifier-free guidance. We provide coverage guarantees by establishing exact non-asymptotic marginal coverage and a finite-sample bound on conditional coverage for the proposed method. Evaluations on real-world time series datasets demonstrate that our method constructs significantly smaller prediction sets than existing conformal prediction methods, maintaining target coverage.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.05709,
  title  = {Flow-based Conformal Prediction for Multi-dimensional Time Series},
  author = {Junghwan Lee and Chen Xu and Yao Xie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05709},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:37:28.804Z