Live data from Hacker News

Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

arxiv.org

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#41
post #40
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think the profitable algo traders are going to tell you that :-)

Why not? Sharing information moves the field forward.

Profitable algorithmic traders are not in the business of moving the field forward. They're in the business of making profits.

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#42
It may not be known yet, and this project seems to be targeted at gaussian distributions, but wouldn't the simplicity bias reduce sensitivity? I mean attention in transformers works so well in part because OOD is typically close enough.

Probably just my own bias because it seems everything I deal with is at least MArP and anomalies are important to my use case.

I can see where this is useful for others, even Amazon suggests ARIMA or ETS if you don't have hundreds of related streams.

Is this more targeted at people who want more smoothing?

Or am I just missing something?

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#43
post #40
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think the profitable algo traders are going to tell you that :-)

Why not? Sharing information moves the field forward.

What field ? They aren't curing cancer, serves 0 purpose to advance the "field".

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#44
post #40
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think the profitable algo traders are going to tell you that :-)

Why not? Sharing information moves the field forward.

You make money with if you have useful data others don't have, or you have better algorithms that others aren't using.

When these become publicly known and used, your system doesn't work any more because the prices now include whatever signal you had for yourself before.

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#45
Coming from finance, I always wonder how and if these large pre-trained models are usable on any financial time series. I see the appeal of pre-trained models in areas where there is clearly a stationary pattern, even if its very hidden (i.e industrial or biological metrics). But given the inherently high signal/noise ratio and how extremely non-stationary or chaotic the financial data processes tend to be, i struggle to see the use of pre-trained foundation models.

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#46

Coming from finance, I always wonder how and if these large pre-trained models are usable on any financial time series. I see the appeal of pre-trained models in areas where there is clearly a stationary pattern, even if its very hidden (i.e industrial or biological metrics). But given the inherently high signal/noise ratio and how extremely non-stationary or chaotic the financial data processes tend to be, i struggl…

I played around with timeGPT beta against predicting the sp500 index performance for the next day (not multi variate time series as I couldn't figure out how to get it setup) and trying to use the confidence intervals it generated to buy options was useless at best

I can see chronos working a bit better, as it tries to convert trends, and pieces of time series into tokens, like gpt does for phrases.

Ie. Stock goes down terribly, then dead cat bounces. This is common.

Stock goes up, hits resistance due to existing sell orders, comes down

Stock is on stable upward trend, continues upward trend

If I can verbalize these usual actions, it's likely chronos can also pickup on them.

Once again quality of data trumps all for LLM's, so performance might vary. If you read the paper, they point out a few situations where the LLM is unable to learn a trend, ie. When the prompting time series isn't long enough.

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#47

As a practitioner the most impactful library for time series has been brms, which basically gives you syntactic sugar for creating statistical models in Stan. Checks all the boxes including probabilistic forecasts, multiple link functions for the likelihood including weiner, gamma, Gaussian, student t, binomial, zero-inflated and hurdle models. Also has auto-regressive and ordinal predictors and you actually learn so…

Could you expand on what you mean by "practitioner?"

Also a followup question. With timeGPT and chronos advertised as "foundational time series models", do you think they have any value?

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#48

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what is the idea behind quantizing and tokenizing time series? We tokenize text because text isn't numbers. In the case of time series, we're... turning numbers into less precise numbers? The benefit of scaling and centering is trivial and i guess all timeseries ML does it, but I don't see why we need a token after that.

I think it could also have a connection with symbolic AI: The discrete tokens could be the symbols that many believe is useful or necessary for reasoning. It is also useful for compression, reducing memory requirements by the quantization and small integer representations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-symbolic_AI

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#49

Coming from finance, I always wonder how and if these large pre-trained models are usable on any financial time series. I see the appeal of pre-trained models in areas where there is clearly a stationary pattern, even if its very hidden (i.e industrial or biological metrics). But given the inherently high signal/noise ratio and how extremely non-stationary or chaotic the financial data processes tend to be, i struggl…

Imitation learning of discretionary traders who rely on a mixture of rules and intuition.

Re: Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

#50

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what is the idea behind quantizing and tokenizing time series? We tokenize text because text isn't numbers. In the case of time series, we're... turning numbers into less precise numbers? The benefit of scaling and centering is trivial and i guess all timeseries ML does it, but I don't see why we need a token after that.

My guess is that it enforces a kind of sparsity constraint.
Post reply on HN