Beyond Statistical Analysis: Multimodal Framework for Time Series Forecasting with LLM-Driven Temporal Pattern

Abstract

Accurate forecasting of time series is crucial for many applications in the real world. Conventional methods primarily rely on statistical analysis of historical data, often leading to overfitting and failing to account for background information and constraints imposed by external events. Therefore, introducing large language models (LLMs) with robust textual capabilities holds significant potential. However, due to the inherent limitations of LLMs in handling numerical data, they do not exhibit advantages in precise numerical prediction tasks. Therefore, we propose a framework to integrate LLMs with conventional methods synergistically. Rather than directly outputting numerical predictions, we leverage the capabilities of the LLMs to generate textual temporal patterns, thereby fully utilizing their inherent knowledge and reasoning abilities. Additionally, we introduce a memory network designed to decode these textual representations into a format that numerical models can effectively interpret. This approach not only capitalizes on the strengths of the LLM in text processing but also bridges the gap between textual and numerical data, enhancing the overall predictive performance of the model. Our experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark datasets.