Paper ID: 2403.05713

tsGT: Stochastic Time Series Modeling With Transformer

Łukasz Kuciński, Witold Drzewakowski, Mateusz Olko, Piotr Kozakowski, Łukasz Maziarka, Marta Emilia Nowakowska, Łukasz Kaiser, Piotr Miłoś

Time series methods are of fundamental importance in virtually any field of science that deals with temporally structured data. Recently, there has been a surge of deterministic transformer models with time series-specific architectural biases. In this paper, we go in a different direction by introducing tsGT, a stochastic time series model built on a general-purpose transformer architecture. We focus on using a well-known and theoretically justified rolling window backtesting and evaluation protocol. We show that tsGT outperforms the state-of-the-art models on MAD and RMSE, and surpasses its stochastic peers on QL and CRPS, on four commonly used datasets. We complement these results with a detailed analysis of tsGT's ability to model the data distribution and predict marginal quantile values.

Submitted: Mar 8, 2024