Neuralized Multi-Wavelet Decomposition for Time Series Classification and Forecasting

Abstract

Time series analysis is fundamental in domains such as finance, healthcare, and meteorology. Real-world time series often exhibit multiscale characteristics shaped by diverse latent factors, resulting in intricate temporal patterns and rich frequency structures. However, existing approaches typically focus on either frequency-domain decomposition or time-domain pattern extraction in isolation, neglecting their joint structure. This decoupled modeling limits representation expressiveness and undermines performance in tasks requiring simultaneous temporal and spectral reasoning. To address this gap, we propose m-WCN, a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that neuralizes multi-wavelet decomposition for joint extraction of temporal patterns and frequency components. By approximating the classical GHM multi-wavelet transform with trainable convolutional operators and enforcing orthogonality constraints, m-WCN produces interpretable multi-resolution representations. Built on this foundation, we introduce two task-specific architectures: TFBC for time series classification, which boosts discriminative features across frequency scales, and FTB for forecasting, which ensembles frequency-aware predictors. Extensive experiments on 64 UCR datasets and seven public forecasting benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Built on the neuralized m-WCN, our TFBC and FTB outperform various baseline models across diverse datasets, achieving average improvements of 19.97% in classification and 19.92% in forecasting tasks.