{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/positional-encoding-in-transformer-based-time","title":"Positional Encoding in Transformer-Based Time Series Models: A Survey","arxiv_id":"2502.12370","date":"2025-02-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Habib Irani","Vangelis Metsis"],"abstract":"Recent advancements in transformer-based models have greatly improved time series analysis, providing robust solutions for tasks such as forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification. A crucial element of these models is positional encoding, which allows transformers to capture the intrinsic sequential nature of time series data. This survey systematically examines existing techniques for positional encoding in transformer-based time series models. We investigate a variety of methods, including fixed, learnable, relative, and hybrid approaches, and evaluate their effectiveness in different time series classification tasks. Furthermore, we outline key challenges and suggest potential research directions to enhance positional encoding strategies. By delivering a comprehensive overview and quantitative benchmarking, this survey intends to assist researchers and practitioners in selecting and designing effective positional encoding methods for transformer-based time series models.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12370v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12370v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"positional-encoding-in-transformer-based-time","repo_url":"https://github.com/imics-lab/positional-encoding-benchmark","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"anomaly-detection","task_name":"Anomaly Detection"},{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"},{"task_slug":"time-series-1","task_name":"Time Series"},{"task_slug":"time-series","task_name":"Time Series Analysis"},{"task_slug":"time-series-classification","task_name":"Time Series Classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}