# TimeCatcher: A Variational Framework for Volatility-Aware Forecasting of Non-Stationary Time Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20448/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [SCINet: Time Series Modeling and Forecasting with Sample Convolution and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09305/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Scalable Representation Learning for Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10738/) (2019)
- [A Multi-Horizon Quantile Recurrent Forecaster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11053/) (2017)
- [Dynamical Variational Autoencoders: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12595/) (2020)
- [xPatch: Dual-Stream Time Series Forecasting with Exponential Seasonal-Trend Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17323/) (2024)
- [Spatiotemporal Attention for Multivariate Time Series Prediction and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04882/) (2020)
- [CSPO: Cross-Market Synergistic Stock Price Movement Forecasting with Pseudo-volatility Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22740/) (2025)
- [Pre-Finetuning with Impact Duration Awareness for Stock Movement Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17419/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent lightweight MLP-based models have achieved strong performance in time series forecasting by capturing stable trends and seasonal patterns. However, their effectiveness hinges on an implicit assumption of local stationarity assumption, making them prone to errors in long-term forecasting of highly non-stationary series, especially when abrupt fluctuations occur, a common challenge in domains like web traffic monitoring. To overcome this limitation, we propose TimeCatcher, a novel Volatility-Aware Variational Forecasting framework. TimeCatcher extends linear architectures with a variational encoder to capture latent dynamic patterns hidden in historical data and a volatility-aware enhancement mechanism to detect and amplify significant local variations. Experiments on nine real-world datasets from traffic, financial, energy, and weather domains show that TimeCatcher consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with particularly large improvements in long-term forecasting scenarios characterized by high volatility and sudden fluctuations. Our code is available at https://github.com/ColaPrinceCHEN/TimeCatcher.