Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDE) are a state-of-the-art tool for supervised learning with irregularly sampled time series (Kidger 2020). However, no theoretical analysis of their performance has been provided yet, and it remains unclear in particular how the roughness of the sampling affects their predictions. By merging the rich theory of controlled differential equations (CDE) and Lipschitz-based measures of the complexity of deep neural nets, we take a first step towards the theoretical understanding of NCDE. Our first result is a sampling-dependant generalization bound for this class of predictors. In a second time, we leverage the continuity of the flow of CDEs to provide a detailed analysis of both the sampling-induced bias and the approximation bias. Regarding this last result, we show how classical approximation results on neural nets may transfer to NCDE. Our theoretical results are validated through a series of experiments.

We consider the task of learning individual-specific intensities of counting processes from a set of static variables and irregularly sampled time series. We introduce a novel modelization approach in which the intensity is the solution to a controlled differential equation. We first design a neural estimator by building on neural controlled differential equations. In a second time, we show that our model can be linearized in the signature space under sufficient regularity conditions, yielding a signature-based estimator which we call CoxSig. We provide theoretical learning guarantees for both estimators, before showcasing the performance of our models on a vast array of simulated and real-world datasets from finance, predictive maintenance and food supply chain management.

We address the problem of learning the dynamics of an unknown non-parametric system linking a target and a feature time series. The feature time series is measured on a sparse and irregular grid, while we have access to only a few points of the target time series. Once learned, we can use these dynamics to predict values of the target from the previous values of the feature time series. We frame this task as learning the solution map of a controlled differential equation (CDE). By leveraging the rich theory of signatures, we are able to cast this non-linear problem as a high-dimensional linear regression. We provide an oracle bound on the prediction error which exhibits explicit dependencies on the individual-specific sampling schemes. Our theoretical results are illustrated by simulations which show that our method outperforms existing algorithms for recovering the full time series while being computationally cheap. We conclude by demonstrating its potential on real-world epidemiological data.