Topic:Time Series Analysis
What is Time Series Analysis? Time series analysis comprises statistical methods for analyzing a sequence of data points collected over an interval of time to identify interesting patterns and trends.
Papers and Code
May 24, 2025
Abstract:Stock price prediction remains a complex and high-stakes task in financial analysis, traditionally addressed using statistical models or, more recently, language models. In this work, we introduce VISTA (Vision-Language Inference for Stock Time-series Analysis), a novel, training-free framework that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for multi-modal stock forecasting. VISTA prompts a VLM with both textual representations of historical stock prices and their corresponding line charts to predict future price values. By combining numerical and visual modalities in a zero-shot setting and using carefully designed chain-of-thought prompts, VISTA captures complementary patterns that unimodal approaches often miss. We benchmark VISTA against standard baselines, including ARIMA and text-only LLM-based prompting methods. Experimental results show that VISTA outperforms these baselines by up to 89.83%, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-modal inference for stock time-series analysis and highlighting the potential of VLMs in financial forecasting tasks without requiring task-specific training.
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May 26, 2025
Abstract:Time series forecasting plays a critical role in domains such as energy, finance, and healthcare, where accurate predictions inform decision-making under uncertainty. Although Transformer-based models have demonstrated success in sequential modeling, their adoption for time series remains limited by challenges such as noise sensitivity, long-range dependencies, and a lack of inductive bias for temporal structure. In this work, we present a unified and principled framework for benchmarking three prominent Transformer forecasting architectures-Autoformer, Informer, and Patchtst-each evaluated through three architectural variants: Minimal, Standard, and Full, representing increasing levels of complexity and modeling capacity. We conduct over 1500 controlled experiments on a suite of ten synthetic signals, spanning five patch lengths and five forecast horizons under both clean and noisy conditions. Our analysis reveals consistent patterns across model families. To advance this landscape further, we introduce the Koopman-enhanced Transformer framework, Deep Koopformer, which integrates operator-theoretic latent state modeling to improve stability and interpretability. We demonstrate its efficacy on nonlinear and chaotic dynamical systems. Our results highlight Koopman based Transformer as a promising hybrid approach for robust, interpretable, and theoretically grounded time series forecasting in noisy and complex real-world conditions.
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May 23, 2025
Abstract:Transformer-based models have shown strong performance across diverse time-series tasks, but their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to high memory and computational demand. While prior work targeting Microcontroller Units (MCUs) has explored hardware-specific optimizations, such approaches are often task-specific and limited to 8-bit fixed-point precision. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer greater flexibility, enabling fine-grained control over data precision and architecture. However, existing FPGA-based deployments of Transformers for time-series analysis typically focus on high-density platforms with manual configuration. This paper presents a unified and fully automated deployment framework for Tiny Transformers on embedded FPGAs. Our framework supports a compact encoder-only Transformer architecture across three representative time-series tasks (forecasting, classification, and anomaly detection). It combines quantization-aware training (down to 4 bits), hardware-aware hyperparameter search using Optuna, and automatic VHDL generation for seamless deployment. We evaluate our framework on six public datasets across two embedded FPGA platforms. Results show that our framework produces integer-only, task-specific Transformer accelerators achieving as low as 0.033 mJ per inference with millisecond latency on AMD Spartan-7, while also providing insights into deployment feasibility on Lattice iCE40. All source code will be released in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/Edwina1030/TinyTransformer4TS).
* 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, accepted by IEEE Computer Society Annual
Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI 2025)
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May 23, 2025
Abstract:Time series segmentation (TSS) is one of the time series (TS) analysis techniques, that has received considerably less attention compared to other TS related tasks. In recent years, deep learning architectures have been introduced for TSS, however their reliance on sliding windows limits segmentation granularity due to fixed window sizes and strides. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new more granular TSS approach that utilizes the Weighted Dual Perspective Visbility Graph (WDPVG) TS into a graph and combines it with a Graph Attention Network (GAT). By transforming TS into graphs, we are able to capture different structural aspects of the data that would otherwise remain hidden. By utilizing the representation learning capabilities of Graph Neural Networks, our method is able to effectively identify meaningful segments within the TS. To better understand the potential of our approach, we also experimented with different TS-to-graph transformations and compared their performance. Our contributions include: a) formulating the TSS as a node classification problem on graphs; b) conducting an extensive analysis of various TS- to-graph transformations applied to TSS using benchmark datasets from the TSSB repository; c) providing the first detailed study on utilizing GNNs for analyzing graph representations of TS in the context of TSS; d) demonstrating the effectiveness of our method, which achieves an average F1 score of 0.97 across 59 diverse TSS benchmark datasets; e) outperforming the seq2point baseline method by 0.05 in terms of F1 score; and f) reducing the required training data compared to the baseline methods.
* 24 pages, 10 figures
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May 23, 2025
Abstract:Recent studies have shown that by introducing prior knowledge, multi-scale analysis of complex and non-stationary time series in real environments can achieve good results in the field of long-term forecasting. However, affected by channel-independent methods, models based on multi-scale analysis may produce suboptimal prediction results due to the autocorrelation between time series labels, which in turn affects the generalization ability of the model. To address this challenge, we are inspired by the idea of sharpness-aware minimization and the recently proposed FreDF method and design a deep learning model TimeCF for long-term time series forecasting based on the TimeMixer, combined with our designed adaptive convolution information aggregation module and Sharpness-Aware Minimization Frequency Domain Loss (SAMFre). Specifically, TimeCF first decomposes the original time series into sequences of different scales. Next, the same-sized convolution modules are used to adaptively aggregate information of different scales on sequences of different scales. Then, decomposing each sequence into season and trend parts and the two parts are mixed at different scales through bottom-up and top-down methods respectively. Finally, different scales are aggregated through a Feed-Forward Network. What's more, extensive experimental results on different real-world datasets show that our proposed TimeCF has excellent performance in the field of long-term forecasting.
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May 22, 2025
Abstract:This paper presents a Wavelet Probabilistic Recurrent Convolutional Network (WPRCN) for Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC), especially effective in handling non-stationary environments, data scarcity and noise perturbations. We introduce a versatile wavelet probabilistic module designed to extract and analyse the probabilistic features, which can seamlessly integrate with a variety of neural network architectures. This probabilistic module comprises an Adaptive Wavelet Probabilistic Feature Generator (AWPG) and a Channel Attention-based Probabilistic Temporal Convolutional Network (APTCN). Such formulation extends the application of wavelet probabilistic neural networks to deep neural networks for MTSC. The AWPG constructs an ensemble probabilistic model addressing different data scarcities and non-stationarity; it adaptively selects the optimal ones and generates probabilistic features for APTCN. The APTCN analyses the correlations of the features and forms a comprehensive feature space with existing MTSC models for classification. Here, we instantiate the proposed module to work in parallel with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and a Causal Fully Convolutional Network (C-FCN), demonstrating its broad applicability in time series analysis. The WPRCN is evaluated on 30 diverse MTS datasets and outperforms all the benchmark algorithms on average accuracy and rank, exhibiting pronounced strength in handling scarce data and physiological data subject to perturbations and non-stationarities.
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May 20, 2025
Abstract:Existing time series tokenization methods predominantly encode a constant number of samples into individual tokens. This inflexible approach can generate excessive tokens for even simple patterns like extended constant values, resulting in substantial computational overhead. Inspired by the success of byte pair encoding, we propose the first pattern-centric tokenization scheme for time series analysis. Based on a discrete vocabulary of frequent motifs, our method merges samples with underlying patterns into tokens, compressing time series adaptively. Exploiting our finite set of motifs and the continuous properties of time series, we further introduce conditional decoding as a lightweight yet powerful post-hoc optimization method, which requires no gradient computation and adds no computational overhead. On recent time series foundation models, our motif-based tokenization improves forecasting performance by 36% and boosts efficiency by 1990% on average. Conditional decoding further reduces MSE by up to 44%. In an extensive analysis, we demonstrate the adaptiveness of our tokenization to diverse temporal patterns, its generalization to unseen data, and its meaningful token representations capturing distinct time series properties, including statistical moments and trends.
* 24 pages in total, 17 figures
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May 19, 2025
Abstract:Reservoir computing is a form of machine learning particularly suited for time series analysis, including forecasting predictions. We take an implementation of \emph{quantum} reservoir computing that was initially designed to generate variants of musical scores and adapt it to create levels of Super Mario Bros. Motivated by our analysis of these levels, we develop a new Roblox \textit{obby} where the courses can be generated in real time on superconducting qubit hardware, and investigate some of the constraints placed by such real-time generation.
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May 23, 2025
Abstract:Deep learning models have significantly improved the ability to detect novelties in time series (TS) data. This success is attributed to their strong representation capabilities. However, due to the inherent variability in TS data, these models often struggle with generalization and robustness. To address this, a common approach is to perform Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, particularly Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA), to handle domain shifts and emerging novel classes. While extensively studied in computer vision, UniDA remains underexplored for TS data. This work provides a comprehensive implementation and comparison of state-of-the-art TS backbones in a UniDA framework. We propose a reliable protocol to evaluate their robustness and generalization across different domains. The goal is to provide practitioners with a framework that can be easily extended to incorporate future advancements in UniDA and TS architectures. Our results highlight the critical influence of backbone selection in UniDA performance and enable a robustness analysis across various datasets and architectures.
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May 19, 2025
Abstract:The rise of time-series pre-trained models has advanced temporal representation learning, but current state-of-the-art models are often large-scale, requiring substantial compute. We introduce TSPulse, ultra-compact time-series pre-trained models with only 1M parameters, specialized to perform strongly across classification, anomaly detection, imputation, and retrieval tasks. TSPulse introduces innovations at both the architecture and task levels. At the architecture level, it employs a dual-space masked reconstruction, learning from both time and frequency domains to capture complementary signals. This is further enhanced by a dual-embedding disentanglement, generating both detailed embeddings for fine-grained analysis and high-level semantic embeddings for broader task understanding. Notably, TSPulse's semantic embeddings are robust to shifts in time, magnitude, and noise, which is important for robust retrieval. At the task level, TSPulse incorporates TSLens, a fine-tuning component enabling task-specific feature attention. It also introduces a multi-head triangulation technique that correlates deviations from multiple prediction heads, enhancing anomaly detection by fusing complementary model outputs. Additionally, a hybrid mask pretraining is proposed to improves zero-shot imputation by reducing pre-training bias. These architecture and task innovations collectively contribute to TSPulse's significant performance gains: 5-16% on the UEA classification benchmarks, +20% on the TSB-AD anomaly detection leaderboard, +50% in zero-shot imputation, and +25% in time-series retrieval. Remarkably, these results are achieved with just 1M parameters, making TSPulse 10-100X smaller than existing pre-trained models. Its efficiency enables GPU-free inference and rapid pre-training, setting a new standard for efficient time-series pre-trained models. Models will be open-sourced soon.
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