A Systematic Review for Transformer-based Long-term Series Forecasting
This is an incremental review paper for researchers in time series forecasting, consolidating existing knowledge rather than presenting new methods.
This paper provides a systematic review of transformer architectures and their variants for long-term time series forecasting, summarizing enhancements, datasets, evaluation metrics, and best practices while proposing future research directions.
The emergence of deep learning has yielded noteworthy advancements in time series forecasting (TSF). Transformer architectures, in particular, have witnessed broad utilization and adoption in TSF tasks. Transformers have proven to be the most successful solution to extract the semantic correlations among the elements within a long sequence. Various variants have enabled transformer architecture to effectively handle long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) tasks. In this article, we first present a comprehensive overview of transformer architectures and their subsequent enhancements developed to address various LTSF tasks. Then, we summarize the publicly available LTSF datasets and relevant evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we provide valuable insights into the best practices and techniques for effectively training transformers in the context of time-series analysis. Lastly, we propose potential research directions in this rapidly evolving field.