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SAGA: A Sequence-Adaptive Generative Architecture for Multi-Horizon Probabilistic Forecasting with Adaptive Temporal Conformal Prediction

Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundström-Imanov, Hafize Gonca Cömert

arXiv 18 May 2026 · Machine Learning

arXiv:2605.19014 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Microsimulation models used by ministries of finance and central banks rely on parametric processes for lifetime earnings that capture only first and second moments of the conditional distribution and miss long-range nonlinear structure. We propose SAGA, a decoder-only transformer for irregular tabular panel sequences, paired with a split conformal calibration wrapper that delivers individual-level prediction intervals with finite-sample marginal coverage guarantees. Trained on the longitudinal Swedish LISA register over 1990 to 2022, comprising 2,143,817 individuals and 61,284,903 person-years, the model forecasts annual labor earnings at horizons of one to thirty years and aggregates them by Monte Carlo into present-discounted lifetime earnings distributions. Against the canonical Guvenen, Karahan, Ozkan, and Song parametric process and tabular and recurrent baselines, SAGA reduces continuous ranked probability score by 31.9 percent at the ten-year horizon and mean absolute error by 37.7 percent at the twenty-year horizon. Conformal intervals achieve nominal coverage to within 0.4 percentage points marginally and within 2.4 percentage points on the worst-case demographic subgroup. The reconstructed lifetime earnings Gini coefficient is 0.327 against the partially observed truth of 0.341 and the GKOS estimate of 0.378. Model weights, calibration tables, and a synthetic equivalent dataset are released for replication outside the protected SCB MONA environment.

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1F. Guvenen, F. Karahan, S. Ozkan, and J. Song, “What do data on mill… (2021) What do data on millions of US workers reveal about lifecycle earnings dynamics?1.00064100%
2Y. Romano, E. Patterson, and E. Candes, “Conformalized quantile regr… (2019) Conformalized quantile regression1.00054100%
3E. Halvorsen, J. Hubmer, S. Salgado, and S. Solenkova, “Earnings dyn… (2024) Earnings dynamics and its intergenerational transmission: Evidence from Norway0.84333100%
4G. Savcisens et al., “Using sequences of life events to predict huma… (2024) Using sequences of life events to predict human lives0.73732100%
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6Y. Gorishniy, I. Rubachev, V. Khrulkov, and A. Babenko, “Revisiting… (2021) Revisiting deep learning models for tabular data0.64422100%
7F. Guvenen, “An empirical investigation of labor income processes,”… (2009) An empirical investigation of labor income processes0.64422100%
8N. Hollmann, S. Muller, K. Eggensperger, and F. Hutter, “Accurate pr… (2025) Accurate predictions on small data with a tabular foundation model0.64422100%
9J. Lei, M. G'Sell, A. Rinaldo, R. J. Tibshirani, and L. Wasserman, “… (2018) Distribution-free predictive inference for regression0.64422100%
10R. Shokri, M. Stronati, C. Song, and V. Shmatikov, “Membership infer… (2017) Membership inference attacks against machine learning models0.64422100%

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