TimeCapsule: Solving the Jigsaw Puzzle of Long-Term Time Series Forecasting with Compressed Predictive Representations
This work addresses forecasting challenges for domains relying on time series data, presenting an incremental improvement by streamlining existing techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of long-term time series forecasting by introducing TimeCapsule, a model that compresses high-dimensional information into a simplified framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks.
Recent deep learning models for Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF) often emphasize complex, handcrafted designs, while simpler architectures like linear models or MLPs have often outperformed these intricate solutions. In this paper, we revisit and organize the core ideas behind several key techniques, such as redundancy reduction and multi-scale modeling, which are frequently employed in advanced LTSF models. Our goal is to streamline these ideas for more efficient deep learning utilization. To this end, we introduce TimeCapsule, a model built around the principle of high-dimensional information compression that unifies these techniques in a generalized yet simplified framework. Specifically, we model time series as a 3D tensor, incorporating temporal, variate, and level dimensions, and leverage mode production to capture multi-mode dependencies while achieving dimensionality compression. We propose an internal forecast within the compressed representation domain, supported by the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), to monitor the learning of predictive representations. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate the versatility of our method, showing that TimeCapsule can achieve state-of-the-art performance.