Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?

Résumé : Recently, there has been a surge of Transformer-based solutions for the time series forecasting (TSF) task, especially for the challenging long-term TSF problem. Transformer architecture relies on self-attention mechanisms to effectively extract the semantic correlations between paired elements in a long sequence, which is permutation-invariant and anti-ordering to some extent. However, in time series modeling, we are to extract the temporal relations among an ordering set of continuous points. Consequently, whether Transformer-based techniques are the right solutions for long-term time series forecasting is an interesting problem to investigate, despite the performance improvements shown in these studies. In this work, we question the validity of Transformer-based TSF solutions. In their experiments, the compared (non-Transformer) baselines are mainly autoregressive forecasting solutions, which usually have a poor long-term prediction capability due to inevitable error accumulation effects. In contrast, we use an embarrassingly simple architecture named DLinear that conducts direct multi-step (DMS) forecasting for comparison. DLinear decomposes the time series into a trend and a remainder series and employs two one-layer linear networks to model these two series for the forecasting task. Surprisingly, it outperforms existing complex Transformer-based models in most cases by a large margin. Therefore, we conclude that the relatively higher long-term forecasting accuracy of Transformer-based TSF solutions shown in existing works has little to do with the temporal relation extraction capabilities of the Transformer architecture. Instead, it is mainly due to the non-autoregressive DMS forecasting strategy used in them. We hope this study also advocates revisiting the validity of Transformer-based solutions for other time series analysis tasks (e.g., anomaly detection) in the future.