# Unlocking the Potential of Deep Learning in Peak-Hour Series Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Non-stationary Transformers: Exploring the Stationarity in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14415/) (2022)
- [The Capacity and Robustness Trade-off: Revisiting the Channel Independent Strategy for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05206/) (2023)
- [National-scale electricity peak load forecasting: Traditional, machine learning, or hybrid model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06174/) (2021)
- [Forecasting Busy-Hour Downlink Traffic in Cellular Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01373/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Unravel Anomalies: An End-to-end Seasonal-Trend Decomposition Approach for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00268/) (2023)
- [Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks in short term load forecasting: Does adding Graph Structure in Consumption Data Improve Predictions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12175/) (2025)
- [PeakFocus: Bridging Peak Localization and Intensity Regression via a Unified Multi-Scale Framework for Electricity Load Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21550/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unlocking the potential of deep learning in Peak-Hour Series Forecasting (PHSF) remains a critical yet underexplored task in various domains. While state-of-the-art deep learning models excel in regular Time Series Forecasting (TSF), they struggle to achieve comparable results in PHSF. This can be attributed to the challenges posed by the high degree of non-stationarity in peak-hour series, which makes direct forecasting more difficult than standard TSF. Additionally, manually extracting the maximum value from regular forecasting results leads to suboptimal performance due to models minimizing the mean deficit. To address these issues, this paper presents Seq2Peak, a novel framework designed specifically for PHSF tasks, bridging the performance gap observed in TSF models. Seq2Peak offers two key components: the CyclicNorm pipeline to mitigate the non-stationarity issue and a simple yet effective trainable-parameter-free peak-hour decoder with a hybrid loss function that utilizes both the original series and peak-hour series as supervised signals. Extensive experimentation on publicly available time series datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework, yielding a remarkable average relative improvement of 37.7% across four real-world datasets for both transformer- and non-transformer-based TSF models.