LSTPrompt: Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters by Long-Short-Term Prompting

Haoxin Liu, Zhiyuan Zhao, Jindong Wang, Harshavardhan Kamarthi, B. Aditya Prakash


Abstract
Time-series forecasting (TSF) finds broad applications in real-world scenarios. Prompting off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates strong zero-shot TSF capabilities while preserving computational efficiency. However, existing prompting methods oversimplify TSF as language next-token predictions, overlooking its dynamic nature and lack of integration with state-of-the-art prompt strategies such as Chain-of-Thought. Thus, we propose LSTPrompt, a novel approach for prompting LLMs in zero-shot TSF tasks. LSTPrompt decomposes TSF into short-term and long-term forecasting sub-tasks, tailoring prompts to each. LSTPrompt guides LLMs to regularly reassess forecasting mechanisms to enhance adaptability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate consistently better performance of LSTPrompt than existing prompting methods, and competitive results compared to foundation TSF models.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.466
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7832–7840
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.466
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.466
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haoxin Liu, Zhiyuan Zhao, Jindong Wang, Harshavardhan Kamarthi, and B. Aditya Prakash. 2024. LSTPrompt: Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters by Long-Short-Term Prompting. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 7832–7840, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LSTPrompt: Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters by Long-Short-Term Prompting (Liu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.466.pdf