Probabilistic Circuits for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

arXiv cs.LG / 5/1/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces CircuITS, a new probabilistic-circuit-based architecture aimed at forecasting irregular multivariate time series while accurately quantifying uncertainty.
  • It addresses limitations of prior methods that often trade off expressivity against consistent marginalization, which can yield unreliable or contradictory forecasts.
  • CircuITS is designed to flexibly model complex dependencies across time-series channels while structurally guaranteeing valid joint probability distributions.
  • Experiments on four real-world datasets show improved performance in both joint and marginal density estimation versus existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Abstract

Joint probabilistic modeling is essential for forecasting irregular multivariate time series (IMTS) to accurately quantify uncertainty. Existing approaches often struggle to balance model expressivity with consistent marginalization, frequently leading to unreliable or contradictory forecasts. To address this, we propose CircuITS, a novel architecture for probabilistic IMTS forecasting based on probabilistic circuits. Our model is flexible in capturing intricate dependencies between time series channels while structurally guaranteeing valid joint distributions. Experiments on four real world datasets demonstrate that CircuITS achieves superior joint and marginal density estimation compared to state of the art baselines.