Your time series is worth a binary image: machine vision assisted deep framework for time series forecasting
This addresses the challenge of inefficient neural processing of numerical time series data for forecasting, offering a novel approach that could benefit various forecasting applications.
The paper tackles time series forecasting by converting numerical time series into binary images for processing with a deep machine vision model, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art models without complex data decomposition or customization.
Time series forecasting (TSF) has been a challenging research area, and various models have been developed to address this task. However, almost all these models are trained with numerical time series data, which is not as effectively processed by the neural system as visual information. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel machine vision assisted deep time series analysis (MV-DTSA) framework. The MV-DTSA framework operates by analyzing time series data in a novel binary machine vision time series metric space, which includes a mapping and an inverse mapping function from the numerical time series space to the binary machine vision space, and a deep machine vision model designed to address the TSF task in the binary space. A comprehensive computational analysis demonstrates that the proposed MV-DTSA framework outperforms state-of-the-art deep TSF models, without requiring sophisticated data decomposition or model customization. The code for our framework is accessible at https://github.com/IkeYang/ machine-vision-assisted-deep-time-series-analysis-MV-DTSA-.