Evaluating Large Language Models on Time Series Feature Understanding: A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Benchmark

Elizabeth Fons, Rachneet Kaur, Soham Palande, Zhen Zeng, Tucker Balch, Manuela Veloso, Svitlana Vyetrenko


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential for automatic time series analysis and reporting, which is a critical task across many domains, spanning healthcare, finance, climate, energy, and many more. In this paper, we propose a framework for rigorously evaluating the capabilities of LLMs on time series understanding, encompassing both univariate and multivariate forms. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of time series features, a critical framework that delineates various characteristics inherent in time series data. Leveraging this taxonomy, we have systematically designed and synthesized a diverse dataset of time series, embodying the different outlined features, each accompanied by textual descriptions. This dataset acts as a solid foundation for assessing the proficiency of LLMs in comprehending time series. Our experiments shed light on the strengths and limitations of state-of-the-art LLMs in time series understanding, revealing which features these models readily comprehend effectively and where they falter. In addition, we uncover the sensitivity of LLMs to factors including the formatting of the data, the position of points queried within a series and the overall time series length.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1204
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21598–21634
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1204/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1204
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elizabeth Fons, Rachneet Kaur, Soham Palande, Zhen Zeng, Tucker Balch, Manuela Veloso, and Svitlana Vyetrenko. 2024. Evaluating Large Language Models on Time Series Feature Understanding: A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Benchmark. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 21598–21634, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Large Language Models on Time Series Feature Understanding: A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Benchmark (Fons et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1204.pdf
Data:
 2024.emnlp-main.1204.data.zip