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Model-Agnostic Online Certificate-Driven Calibration for Time Series Forecasting Under Distribution Shift
Proceedings of the 42nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, PMLR 337:2244-2273, 2026.
Abstract
Time series out-of-distribution generalization requires forecasters to remain reliable when deployment dynamics differ from training conditions due to covariate shift, concept shift, and temporal dependence. Probably Approximately Correct {Bayesian} domain adaptation provides computable certificates by decomposing target risk into a source risk term, a source-to-target mismatch term, and a complexity term, but standard analyses rely on independent sampling and distributional stability, assumptions that are violated in time series by serial dependence and nonstationary shift. We propose a model-agnostic online martingale Probably Approximately Correct {Bayesian} framework that yields finite-sample certificates under temporal dependence and distribution shift. The certificate replaces independent-sample concentration with martingale concentration that adapts to loss scale and predictable variation. We use the certificate as a surrogate regularizer for online calibration by training a gated residual {Bayesian} head on top of a fixed forecasting backbone, producing a corrective update that reverts to the backbone prediction when the gate is closed. Online calibration combines a source risk anchor, a posterior-shift penalty, and a time-adaptive mismatch term computed from target windows observed before forecasting. It follows a predict-then-update protocol in which outcomes become available only after forecasting and are used to update subsequent predictions. Experiments across convolutional, attention-based, and large language model-based forecasters show improved stability and accuracy under covariate and concept shift.