Creating a Causally Grounded Rating Method for Assessing the Robustness of AI Models for Time-Series Forecasting

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lakkaraju, Kausik, Kaur, Rachneet, Zehtabi, Parisa, Patra, Sunandita, Zeng, Zhen, Valluru, Siva Likitha, Srivastava, Biplav, Valtorta, Marco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915756919226368
author Lakkaraju, Kausik
Kaur, Rachneet
Zehtabi, Parisa
Patra, Sunandita
Zeng, Zhen
Valluru, Siva Likitha
Srivastava, Biplav
Valtorta, Marco
author_facet Lakkaraju, Kausik
Kaur, Rachneet
Zehtabi, Parisa
Patra, Sunandita
Zeng, Zhen
Valluru, Siva Likitha
Srivastava, Biplav
Valtorta, Marco
contents AI models, including both time-series-specific and general-purpose Foundation Models (FMs), have demonstrated strong potential in time-series forecasting across sectors like finance. However, these models are highly sensitive to input perturbations, which can lead to prediction errors and undermine trust among stakeholders, including investors and analysts. To address this challenge, we propose a causally grounded rating framework to systematically evaluate model robustness by analyzing statistical and confounding biases under various noisy and erroneous input scenarios. Our framework is applied to a large-scale experimental setup involving stock price data from multiple industries and evaluates both uni-modal and multi-modal models, including Vision Transformer-based (ViT) models and FMs. We introduce six types of input perturbations and twelve data distributions to assess model performance. Results indicate that multi-modal and time-series-specific FMs demonstrate greater robustness and accuracy compared to general-purpose models. Further, to validate our framework's usability, we conduct a user study showcasing time-series models' prediction errors along with our computed ratings. The study confirms that our ratings reduce the difficulty for users in comparing the robustness of different models. Our findings can help stakeholders understand model behaviors in terms of robustness and accuracy for better decision-making even without access to the model weights and training data, i.e., black-box settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_12226
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Creating a Causally Grounded Rating Method for Assessing the Robustness of AI Models for Time-Series Forecasting
Lakkaraju, Kausik
Kaur, Rachneet
Zehtabi, Parisa
Patra, Sunandita
Zeng, Zhen
Valluru, Siva Likitha
Srivastava, Biplav
Valtorta, Marco
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
AI models, including both time-series-specific and general-purpose Foundation Models (FMs), have demonstrated strong potential in time-series forecasting across sectors like finance. However, these models are highly sensitive to input perturbations, which can lead to prediction errors and undermine trust among stakeholders, including investors and analysts. To address this challenge, we propose a causally grounded rating framework to systematically evaluate model robustness by analyzing statistical and confounding biases under various noisy and erroneous input scenarios. Our framework is applied to a large-scale experimental setup involving stock price data from multiple industries and evaluates both uni-modal and multi-modal models, including Vision Transformer-based (ViT) models and FMs. We introduce six types of input perturbations and twelve data distributions to assess model performance. Results indicate that multi-modal and time-series-specific FMs demonstrate greater robustness and accuracy compared to general-purpose models. Further, to validate our framework's usability, we conduct a user study showcasing time-series models' prediction errors along with our computed ratings. The study confirms that our ratings reduce the difficulty for users in comparing the robustness of different models. Our findings can help stakeholders understand model behaviors in terms of robustness and accuracy for better decision-making even without access to the model weights and training data, i.e., black-box settings.
title Creating a Causally Grounded Rating Method for Assessing the Robustness of AI Models for Time-Series Forecasting
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12226