SimTS: Rethinking Contrastive Representation Learning for Time Series Forecasting

Contrastive learning methods have shown an impressive ability to learn meaningful representations for image or time series classification. However, these methods are less effective for time series forecasting, as optimization of instance discrimination is not directly applicable to predicting the future state from the history context. Moreover, the construction of positive and negative pairs in current technologies strongly relies on specific time series characteristics, restricting their generalization across diverse types of time series data. To address these limitations, we propose SimTS, a simple representation learning approach for improving time series forecasting by learning to predict the future from the past in the latent space. SimTS does not rely on negative pairs or specific assumptions about the characteristics of the particular time series. Our extensive experiments on several benchmark time series forecasting datasets show that SimTS achieves competitive performance compared to existing contrastive learning methods. Furthermore, we show the shortcomings of the current contrastive learning framework used for time series forecasting through a detailed ablation study. Overall, our work suggests that SimTS is a promising alternative to other contrastive learning approaches for time series forecasting.