# Parsimony or Capability? Decomposition Delivers Both in Long-term Time Series Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11929 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11929/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02186/) (2022)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01728/) (2023)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07820/) (2023)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [FITS: Modeling Time Series with 10k Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03756/) (2023)
- [Frequency-domain MLPs are More Effective Learners in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06184/) (2023)
- [Spatial-Temporal Identity: A Simple yet Effective Baseline for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05233/) (2022)
- [Pre-training Enhanced Spatial-temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09113/) (2022)
- [The Capacity and Robustness Trade-off: Revisiting the Channel Independent Strategy for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05206/) (2023)
- [Dish-TS: A General Paradigm for Alleviating Distribution Shift in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14829/) (2023)
- [Spatio-Temporal Meta-Graph Learning for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14701/) (2022)
- [Predict, Refine, Synthesize: Self-Guiding Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11494/) (2023)
- [DL-Traff: Survey and Benchmark of Deep Learning Models for Urban Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09091/) (2021)
- [DiffTraj: Generating GPS Trajectory with Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11582/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Temporal Query Network for Efficient Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12917/) (2025)
- [Merlin: Multi-View Representation Learning for Robust Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Unfixed Missing Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12459/) (2025)
- [BLAST: Balanced Sampling Time Series Corpus for Universal Forecasting Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17871/) (2025)
- [FinePhys: Fine-grained Human Action Generation by Explicitly Incorporating Physical Laws for Effective Skeletal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13437/) (2025)
- [Multi-Modal View Enhanced Large Vision Models for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24003/) (2025)
- [PhaseFormer: From Patches to Phases for Efficient and Effective Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04134/) (2025)
- [On the Integration of Spatial-Temporal Knowledge: A Lightweight Approach to Atmospheric Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09695/) (2024)
- [KANMixer: a minimal KAN-centered mixer for long-term time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01575/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Spatio-temporal Quantile Forecasting with Curriculum Learning: Lessons Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12709/) (2024)
- [A Gravity-informed Spatiotemporal Transformer for Human Activity Intensity Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13678/) (2025)
- [PULSE: Generative Phase Evolution for Non-Stationary Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16793/) (2026)
- [Non-collective Calibrating Strategy for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03176/) (2025)
- [Inner-Instance Normalization for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08657/) (2025)
- [PAMNet: Cycle-aware Phase-Amplitude Modulation Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02938/) (2026)
- [Accurate and Efficient Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Offline Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05738/) (2025)
- [ReNF: Rethinking the Design of Neural Long-Term Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25914/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Oscillatory-State Alignment for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06010/) (2026)
- [DecoVAE: a Lightweight Interpretable Trend-Seasonal VAE Framework for Efficient Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20052/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) represents a critical frontier in time series analysis, characterized by extensive input sequences, as opposed to the shorter spans typical of traditional approaches. While longer sequences inherently offer richer information for enhanced predictive precision, prevailing studies often respond by escalating model complexity. These intricate models can inflate into millions of parameters, resulting in prohibitive parameter scales. Our study demonstrates, through both analytical and empirical evidence, that decomposition is key to containing excessive model inflation while achieving uniformly superior and robust results across various datasets. Remarkably, by tailoring decomposition to the intrinsic dynamics of time series data, our proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks, using over 99 % fewer parameters than the majority of competing methods. Through this work, we aim to unleash the power of a restricted set of parameters by capitalizing on domain characteristics--a timely reminder that in the realm of LTSF, bigger is not invariably better.