TimeEmb: A Lightweight Static-Dynamic Disentanglement Framework for Time Series Forecasting
About
Temporal non-stationarity, the phenomenon that time series distributions change over time, poses fundamental challenges to reliable time series forecasting. Intuitively, the complex time series can be decomposed into two factors, \ie time-invariant and time-varying components, which indicate static and dynamic patterns, respectively. Nonetheless, existing methods often conflate the time-varying and time-invariant components, and jointly learn the combined long-term patterns and short-term fluctuations, leading to suboptimal performance facing distribution shifts. To address this issue, we initiatively propose a lightweight static-dynamic decomposition framework, TimeEmb, for time series forecasting. TimeEmb innovatively separates time series into two complementary components: (1) time-invariant component, captured by a novel global embedding module that learns persistent representations across time series, and (2) time-varying component, processed by an efficient frequency-domain filtering mechanism inspired by full-spectrum analysis in signal processing. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TimeEmb outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and requires fewer computational resources. We conduct comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analyses to verify the efficacy of static-dynamic disentanglement. This lightweight framework can also improve existing time-series forecasting methods with simple integration. To ease reproducibility, the code is available at https://github.com/showmeon/TimeEmb.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multivariate Time-series Forecasting | ETTm1 | MSE0.305 | 686 | |
| Long-term forecasting | ETTm1 | MSE0.368 | 422 | |
| Long-term forecasting | ETTh1 | MSE0.425 | 409 | |
| Long-term forecasting | ETTm2 | MSE0.264 | 350 | |
| Long-term forecasting | ETTh2 | MSE0.362 | 310 | |
| Multivariate Time-series Forecasting | PeMS04 | MSE0.096 | 107 | |
| Long-term forecasting | Traffic | MSE0.454 | 39 | |
| Multivariate Time-series Forecasting | Weather (7:1:2) | MSE0.237 | 10 | |
| Multivariate Time-series Forecasting | ETTm2 (6:2:2) | MSE0.265 | 10 | |
| Multivariate Time-series Forecasting | ETTh1 (6:2:2) | MSE0.425 | 10 |