metadata
license: mit
BEDTime: Benchmark for Evaluating Descriptions of Time Series in Multi-Modal Language Models
Dataset Summary BEDTime is a unified benchmark for evaluating large language and vision-language models on the task of describing time series data. While there are few existing datasets specifically created for time series-to-text generation, many datasets with paired time series and natural language descriptions can be reformulated to fit this purpose. BEDTime does exactly that — harmonizing four existing datasets into a cohesive benchmark.
BEDTime contains a total of 10,175 time series with corresponding natural language descriptions drawn from four sources:
TRUCE-Stock:
- Real-world stock data collected via the Google Finance API
- 5,687 time series, each 12 time steps long
- 3 human-written crowd-sourced descriptions per series
- Descriptions (≤ 9 words) focus on trends, volatility, and relative change
TRUCE-Synthetic:
- 1,677 synthetic time series
- Each constructed to exhibit exactly one of six predefined patterns (e.g., increase-in-beginning)
- 3 crowd-sourced descriptions per series (2–8 words)
- Small noise added for realism
SUSHI-Tiny:
- 1,400 synthetic time series
- Generated with combinations of trends, periodicities, and fluctuation types
- Descriptions are synthetically generated based on known generation properties
TaxoSynth:
- 1,400 synthetic time series
- Lengths range from 24 to 150 time steps
- Annotated using attribute-based taxonomy and template-based text generation
- Descriptions are 5 to 40 words long
Supported Tasks and Leaderboards
- Time Series Captioning (open-generation)
- Time Series Understanding (true/false(recognition), multiple choice(differentiation))
Languages
- English
Dataset Structure Each entry includes:
- A time series ( xi )
- One or more paired natural language descriptions ( di )