STeP-TS: Shared Temporal Filters with Pruning for Time Series

Overview & Synopsis

Multivariate time series forecasting requires capturing temporal dependencies across multiple scales while accounting for both shared and variable-specific dynamics. Compact forecasting models have emerged as an attractive alternative to increasingly large architectures, but preserving strong predictive performance within tight computational and memory budgets remains challenging. We propose a compact one-layer convolutional framework that learns a shared bank of multi-scale temporal filters of each variable. Lightweight variable-specific scalar weights determine the contribution of each temporal component, enabling the model to capture shared temporal structure while adapting to variable-specific dynamics. The learned weights and filter-output energy further provide a natural signal for structured pruning of convolutional filters, reducing computational complexity with minimal degradation in forecasting performance. We additionally introduce an amplitude-adaptive normalization mechanism that preserves variable-dependent temporal amplitudes. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate forecasting performance competitive with state-of-the-art methods while requiring substantially fewer parameters and inference FLOPs and achieving low per-sample latency.