{"id":35126,"date":"2026-04-13T14:10:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T14:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/publication\/aalf-almost-always-linear-forecasting-2\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T13:17:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T13:17:35","slug":"aalf-almost-always-linear-forecasting-2","status":"publish","type":"publication","link":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/publication\/aalf-almost-always-linear-forecasting-2\/","title":{"rendered":"{AALF}: Almost Always Linear Forecasting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recent work for time-series forecasting increasingly leverages the high predictive power of Deep Learning models. With this increase in model complexity, however, comes a lack in understanding of the underlying model decision process, which is problematic for safety-critical application scenarios. At the same time, simple, interpretable forecasting methods such as {ARIMA} and {ETS} still perform very well, sometimes on-par with Deep Learning approaches. We argue that using interpretable forecasters leads to good predictions in most cases. However, the forecasting performance can be improved by selecting a Deep Learning method only for few, important predictions, increasing the overall interpretability of the forecasting process. In this context, we propose a novel online model selection framework which learns to identify these predictions. An extensive empirical study on various real-world datasets containing over 3500 individual time-series shows that our selection methodology performs comparable to state-of-the-art online model selection methods in most cases while being significantly more interpretable. We find that almost always choosing a simple autoregressive or exponential smoothing model for forecasting, results in competitive performance, suggesting that the need for opaque black-box models in time-series forecasting might be smaller than recent works would suggest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recent work for time-series forecasting increasingly leverages the high predictive power of Deep Learning models. With this increase in model complexity, however, comes a lack in understanding of the underlying model decision process, which is problematic for safety-critical application scenarios. At the same time, simple, interpretable forecasting methods such as {ARIMA} and {ETS} still perform very well, sometimes on-par with Deep Learning approaches. We argue that using interpretable forecasters leads [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"publication-type":[30],"class_list":["post-35126","publication","type-publication","status-publish","hentry","publication-type-article"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/35126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/publication"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/35126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication-type?post=35126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}