Predictive Surprise as Self-Grounding Concept Bottleneck for Interpretable Time Series

Sachith Abeywickrama, Emadeldeen Eldele, Min Wu, Xiaoli Li, Chau Yuen

Predictive Surprise as Self-Grounding Concept Bottleneck for Interpretable Time Series: 3 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #31 of 39 papers on 2026-11-11. Day-by-day upvote history.

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It had 3 upvotes by its first day, 3 upvotes by the next day, 3 upvotes by day 3, 3 upvotes by day 7, and has 3 now. It ranked #99 of 133 papers in its week and #274 of 340 in its month. Its code repository has 5 GitHub stars.

Time-series classifiers deployed in risk-sensitive domains must be (1) accurate, (2) interpretable, and (3) able to abstain when evidence is weak. Existing methods do not deliver all 3 at once, and the obstacle is structural, rather than logistical. Meaningful temporal patterns cannot be defined without knowing segment boundaries, yet meaningful boundaries cannot be placed without knowing which patterns to expect. Existing approaches break this circularity by using fixed windows or expert-annotated vocabularies, thereby sacrificing at least one of the 3 properties. We introduce ConceptTime, which closes the loop through a single self-supervised signal. A frozen probabilistic forecaster predicts a distribution over the next observation at every timestep of the sequence. We call the mismatch between its prediction and the realized signal the predictive surprise. This signal both locates segment boundaries and characterizes each resulting segment through the forecaster. Segments are thus grounded by how they behaved relative to expectation, not by what they look like. These summaries cluster into a vocabulary of dynamical regimes that we call concepts. A lightweight head classifies from the concept sequence, and the distance to the nearest concept yields reliability by design. Across 17 public benchmarks, ConceptTime is competitive with state-of-the-art black-box accuracy, beats every interpretable baseline, and retains near-98% accuracy on Epilepsy with 1% of labels. It further remains competitive with softmax, prototype-distance, and SHAP/TimeX/TimeX++ on OOD detection and deletion faithfulness, without a single annotation, language model call, or domain expert. Code is available at: https://github.com/Sachithx/ConceptTime.git.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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