Timezone: »

 
Spotlight Poster
One Fits All: Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM
Tian Zhou · Peisong Niu · xue wang · Liang Sun · Rong Jin

Thu Dec 14 08:45 AM -- 10:45 AM (PST) @ Great Hall & Hall B1+B2 #1024
in Poster Session 5 »

Although we have witnessed great success of pre-trained models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), limited progress has been made for general time series analysis. Unlike NLP and CV where a unified model can be used to perform different tasks, specially designed approach still dominates in each time series analysis task such as classification, anomaly detection, forecasting, and few-shot learning. The main challenge that blocks the development of pre-trained model for time series analysis is the lack of a large amount of data for training. In this work, we address this challenge by leveraging language or CV models, pre-trained from billions of tokens, for time series analysis. Specifically, we refrain from altering the self-attention and feedforward layers of the residual blocks in the pre-trained language or image model. This model, known as the Frozen Pretrained Transformer (FPT), is evaluated through fine-tuning on all major types of tasks involving time series. Our results demonstrate that pre-trained models on natural language or images can lead to a comparable or state-of-the-art performance in all main time series analysis tasks, as illustrated in Figure1. We also found both theoretically and empirically that the self-attention module behaviors similarly to principle component analysis (PCA), an observation that helps explains how transformer bridges the domain gap and a crucial step towards understanding the universality of a pre-trained transformer. The code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Pretrained-LM-for-TSForcasting-C561.

Author Information

Tian Zhou (Alibaba Group)
Peisong Niu (Alibaba-inc)
xue wang (Alibaba)
Liang Sun (Alibaba Group)
Rong Jin (Alibaba)

More from the Same Authors