arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

On the Encoding of Calendar Features in Covariate-Informed Time Series Foundation Models

The paper investigates how different calendar feature encodings influence the performance of covariate-informed time series foundation models (TSFMs). Seven encoding schemes—three target‑agnostic (ordinal, one‑hot, cyclic) and four target‑based—are systematically compared across four state‑of‑the‑art TSFMs on nine datasets that reflect social activity patterns such as weekends and holidays. Results show that encoding choice can change forecast accuracy by up to 9.9 % on non‑holidays and 83 % on holidays, with improvements mainly around holidays and varying effects across models.

By Alexander Kreusel, Maximilian Beichter, Alexandra Nikoltchovska, Benjamin Sch\"afer, Ralf Mikut, Frederik Zahn, Veit Hagenmeyer