MLOW: Interpretable Low-Rank Frequency Magnitude Decomposition of Multiple Effects for Time Series Forecasting

Abstract: Separating multiple effects in time series is fundamental yet challenging for time-series forecasting (TSF). However, existing TSF models cannot effectively learn interpretable multi-effect decomposition by their smoothing-based temporal techniques. Here, a new interpretable frequency-based decomposition pipeline MLOW captures the insight: a time series can be represented as a magnitude spectrum multiplied by the corresponding phase-aware basis functions, and the magnitude spectrum distribution of a time series always exhibits observable patterns for different effects. MLOW learns a low-rank representation of the magnitude spectrum to capture dominant trending and seasonal effects. We explore low-rank methods, including PCA, NMF, and Semi-NMF, and find that none can simultaneously achieve interpretable, efficient and generalizable decomposition. Thus, we propose hyperplane-nonnegative matrix factorization (Hyperplane-NMF). Further, to address the frequency (spectral) leakage restricting high-quality low-rank decomposition, MLOW enables a flexible selection of input horizons and frequency levels via a mathematical mechanism. Visual analysis demonstrates that MLOW enables interpretable and hierarchical multiple-effect decomposition, robust to noises. It can also enable plug-and-play in existing TSF backbones with remarkable performance improvement but minimal architectural modifications.