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

arXiv:2611.12955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.