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xaitimesynth: A Python Package for Evaluating Attribution Methods for Time Series with Synthetic Ground Truth

Gregor Baer

Abstract

Evaluating time series attribution methods is difficult because real-world datasets rarely provide ground truth for which time points drive a prediction. A common workaround is to generate synthetic data where class-discriminating features are placed at known locations, but each study currently reimplements this from scratch. We introduce xaitimesynth, a Python package that provides reusable infrastructure for this evaluation approach. The package generates synthetic time series following an additive model where each sample is a sum of background signal and a localized, class-discriminating feature, with the feature window automatically tracked as a ground truth mask. A fluent data generation API and YAML configuration format allow flexible and reproducible dataset definitions for both univariate and multivariate time series. The package also provides standard localization metrics, including AUC-PR, AUC-ROC, Relevance Mass Accuracy, and Relevance Rank Accuracy. xaitimesynth is open source and available at https://github.com/gregorbaer/xaitimesynth.

xaitimesynth: A Python Package for Evaluating Attribution Methods for Time Series with Synthetic Ground Truth

Abstract

Evaluating time series attribution methods is difficult because real-world datasets rarely provide ground truth for which time points drive a prediction. A common workaround is to generate synthetic data where class-discriminating features are placed at known locations, but each study currently reimplements this from scratch. We introduce xaitimesynth, a Python package that provides reusable infrastructure for this evaluation approach. The package generates synthetic time series following an additive model where each sample is a sum of background signal and a localized, class-discriminating feature, with the feature window automatically tracked as a ground truth mask. A fluent data generation API and YAML configuration format allow flexible and reproducible dataset definitions for both univariate and multivariate time series. The package also provides standard localization metrics, including AUC-PR, AUC-ROC, Relevance Mass Accuracy, and Relevance Rank Accuracy. xaitimesynth is open source and available at https://github.com/gregorbaer/xaitimesynth.
Paper Structure (7 sections, 1 figure, 2 tables)

This paper contains 7 sections, 1 figure, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Package Design
  4. Data Generation
  5. Evaluation Metrics
  6. Availability and Documentation
  7. Conclusion

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: One example per class from the synthetic dataset defined in Listing \ref{['lst:workflow']}. Each row shows one class; columns show the background signal, the localized feature, and their sum. The shaded region in the rightmost column marks the ground-truth feature window. Class 0 contains a Gaussian pulse, class 1 an oscillation burst; both share a Gaussian noise background. Generated with plot_components(train), a built-in visualization utility.