# BinConv: A Neural Architecture for Ordinal Encoding in Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24595 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24595/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [DeepAR: Probabilistic Forecasting with Autoregressive Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04110/) (2017)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07815/) (2024)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series with Missing Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01865/) (2016)
- [Time Series Forecasting With Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13408/) (2020)
- [On Embeddings for Numerical Features in Tabular Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05556/) (2022)
- [Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting via Conditioned Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06103/) (2020)
- [ProbTS: Benchmarking Point and Distributional Forecasting across Diverse Prediction Horizons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07446/) (2023)
- [Performance of Zero-Shot Time Series Foundation Models on Cloud Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12944/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work in time series forecasting has explored reformulating regression as a classification task. By discretizing the continuous target space into bins and predicting over a fixed set of classes, these approaches benefit from more stable training, improved uncertainty modeling, and compatibility with modern deep learning architectures. However, most existing methods rely on one-hot encoding, which ignores the inherent ordinal structure of the target values. As a result, they fail to convey information about the relative distance between predicted and true values during training. In this paper, we address this limitation by applying Cumulative Binary Encoding (CBE), a monotonic binary representation that transforms both model inputs and outputs. CBE implicitly preserves ordinal and magnitude information, allowing models to learn distance aware representations while operating within a classification framework. To leverage CBE effectively, we propose BinConv, a fully convolutional neural network architecture designed for probabilistic forecasting. We demonstrate that standard fully connected layers are not only less computationally efficient than convolutional layers when used with CBE, but also degrade forecasting performance. Our experiments on standard benchmark datasets show that BinConv achieves superior performance compared to widely used baselines in both point and probabilistic forecasting, while requiring fewer parameters and enabling faster training.