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Are Language Models Actually Useful for Time Series Forecasting?

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arxiv 2406.16964 v2 pith:BZYEN23M submitted 2024-06-22 cs.LG cs.AI

Mingtian Tan , Mike A. Merrill , Vinayak Gupta , Tim Althoff , Thomas Hartvigsen This is my paper · ORCID
classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords seriestimeforecastingmodelsfindlanguageactuallyattention
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Large language models (LLMs) are being applied to time series forecasting. But are language models actually useful for time series? In a series of ablation studies on three recent and popular LLM-based time series forecasting methods, we find that removing the LLM component or replacing it with a basic attention layer does not degrade forecasting performance -- in most cases, the results even improve! We also find that despite their significant computational cost, pretrained LLMs do no better than models trained from scratch, do not represent the sequential dependencies in time series, and do not assist in few-shot settings. Additionally, we explore time series encoders and find that patching and attention structures perform similarly to LLM-based forecasters.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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