Modeling Inter-Dependence Between Time and Mark in Multivariate Temporal Point Processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multivariate temporal point process model that captures the inter-dependence between event times and marks, improving predictive accuracy over traditional models that assume independence.

Contribution

It proposes a new TPP framework that models the conditional dependence between time and mark, enhancing the modeling of entangled event features.

Findings

Outperforms existing models in standard prediction tasks.

Effectively captures the inter-dependence between time and mark.

Demonstrates improved predictive performance on multiple datasets.

Abstract

Temporal Point Processes (TPP) are probabilistic generative frameworks. They model discrete event sequences localized in continuous time. Generally, real-life events reveal descriptive information, known as marks. Marked TPPs model time and marks of the event together for practical relevance. Conditioned on past events, marked TPPs aim to learn the joint distribution of the time and the mark of the next event. For simplicity, conditionally independent TPP models assume time and marks are independent given event history. They factorize the conditional joint distribution of time and mark into the product of individual conditional distributions. This structural limitation in the design of TPP models hurt the predictive performance on entangled time and mark interactions. In this work, we model the conditional inter-dependence of time and mark to overcome the limitations of conditionally independent models. We construct a multivariate TPP conditioning the time distribution on the current event mark in addition to past events. Besides the conventional intensity-based models for conditional joint distribution, we also draw on flexible intensity-free TPP models from the literature. The proposed TPP models outperform conditionally independent and dependent models in standard prediction tasks. Our experimentation on various datasets with multiple evaluation metrics highlights the merit of the proposed approach.