# D2Vformer: A Flexible Time Series Prediction Model Based on Time Position Embedding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [DeepAR: Probabilistic Forecasting with Autoregressive Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04110/) (2017)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [Are Transformers universal approximators of sequence-to-sequence functions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10077/) (2019)
- [Non-stationary Transformers: Exploring the Stationarity in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14415/) (2022)
- [TimeMixer: Decomposable Multiscale Mixing for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14616/) (2024)
- [Gate-Variants of Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05923/) (2017)
- [Multi-Time Attention Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10318/) (2021)
- [Time2Vec: Learning a Vector Representation of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05321/) (2019)
- [FITS: Modeling Time Series with 10k Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03756/) (2023)
- [ETSformer: Exponential Smoothing Transformers for Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01381/) (2022)
- [LLM4TS: Aligning Pre-Trained LLMs as Data-Efficient Time-Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08469/) (2023)
- [Dish-TS: A General Paradigm for Alleviating Distribution Shift in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14829/) (2023)
- [AutoTimes: Autoregressive Time Series Forecasters via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02370/) (2024)
- [Long-Range Transformers for Dynamic Spatiotemporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12218/) (2021)
- [First De-Trend then Attend: Rethinking Attention for Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08151/) (2022)
- [Dateformer: Time-modeling Transformer for Longer-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05397/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [To See Far, Look Close: Evolutionary Forecasting for Long-term Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23114/) (2026)
- [Multi-Scale Convolution with Optimal Transport Attention Effect on Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10740/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time position embeddings capture the positional information of time steps, often serving as auxiliary inputs to enhance the predictive capabilities of time series models. However, existing models exhibit limitations in capturing intricate time positional information and effectively utilizing these embeddings. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel model called D2Vformer. Unlike typical prediction methods that rely on RNNs or Transformers, this approach can directly handle scenarios where the predicted sequence is not adjacent to the input sequence or where its length dynamically changes. In comparison to conventional methods, D2Vformer undoubtedly saves a significant amount of training resources. In D2Vformer, the Date2Vec module uses the timestamp information and feature sequences to generate time position embeddings. Afterward, D2Vformer introduces a new fusion block that utilizes an attention mechanism to explore the similarity in time positions between the embeddings of the input sequence and the predicted sequence, thereby generating predictions based on this similarity. Through extensive experiments on six datasets, we demonstrate that Date2Vec outperforms other time position embedding methods, and D2Vformer surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both fixed-length and variable-length prediction tasks.
