A Primer on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

This work introduces Probabilistic Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (P-KAN), a novel probabilistic extension of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for time series forecasting. By replacing scalar weights with spline-based functional connections and directly parameterizing predictive distributions, P-KANs offer expressive yet parameter-efficient models capable of capturing nonlinear and heavy-tailed dynamics. We evaluate P-KANs on satellite traffic forecasting, where uncertainty-aware predictions enable dynamic thresholding for resource allocation. Results show that P-KANs consistently outperform Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) baselines in both accuracy and calibration, achieving superior efficiency-risk trade-offs while using significantly fewer parameters. We build up P-KANs on two distributions, namely Gaussian and Student-t distributions. The Gaussian variant provides robust, conservative forecasts suitable for safety-critical scenarios, whereas the Student-t variant yields sharper distributions that improve efficiency under stable demand. These findings establish P-KANs as a powerful framework for probabilistic forecasting with direct applicability to satellite communications and other resource-constrained domains.