NeuroFlexMLP: A Low Complexity MLP Architecture for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

Forecasting time series over long horizons is essential for proactive decision-making in many systems. Recent research has focused on transformer-based architectures, which capture long-range dependencies in sequential data. However, several studies show that simpler linear models can outperform transformers by avoiding overfitting during training. In this context, we present NeuroFlexMLP, a deep learning model for multivariate time series forecasting tasks. NeuroFlexMLP's key distinct feature is the adaptability to the diverse complexity of real-world time series, which is achieved, from the architecture standpoint, by adding non-linear residual blocks to a first linear block. This architectural design simplifies hyperparameter optimization, leading to accurate forecasts for various time series data types regardless of the lookback or prediction horizons, outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on challenging real-world datasets. Its Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) design ensures high computational efficiency, making it scalable for longer input sequences than transformer-based models. We validate NeuroFlexMLP for the LEO satellite beam hopping use case, where its lightweight design enables on-board deployment, and on state-of-the art AI datasets. Across all these benchmarks, NeuroFlexMLP achieves competitive accuracy over state-of-the-art models while providing an adaptive architecture that significantly reduces computational overhead. On the LEO beam hopping task, it achieves up to 35.9% MSE reduction over Informer, which translates into up to 28% lower provisioning cost under asymmetric cost models that penalize under-allocation more heavily than over-allocation.