Score: 2

Benchmarking Catastrophic Forgetting Mitigation Methods in Federated Time Series Forecasting

Published: October 24, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.21491v1

By: Khaled Hallak, Oudom Kem

Potential Business Impact:

Keeps smart devices learning new things without forgetting.

Business Areas:
Predictive Analytics Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Catastrophic forgetting (CF) poses a persistent challenge in continual learning (CL), especially within federated learning (FL) environments characterized by non-i.i.d. time series data. While existing research has largely focused on classification tasks in vision domains, the regression-based forecasting setting prevalent in IoT and edge applications remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first benchmarking framework tailored to investigate CF in federated continual time series forecasting. Using the Beijing Multi-site Air Quality dataset across 12 decentralized clients, we systematically evaluate several CF mitigation strategies, including Replay, Elastic Weight Consolidation, Learning without Forgetting, and Synaptic Intelligence. Key contributions include: (i) introducing a new benchmark for CF in time series FL, (ii) conducting a comprehensive comparative analysis of state-of-the-art methods, and (iii) releasing a reproducible open-source framework. This work provides essential tools and insights for advancing continual learning in federated time-series forecasting systems.

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
8 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)