AutoMixer for Improved Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting on Business and IT Observability Data

TL;DR

AutoMixer is a novel foundation model that improves multivariate time-series forecasting of business and IT observability data by effectively decoupling useful and noisy inter-channel interactions, leading to more accurate Biz-KPI predictions.

Contribution

It introduces AutoMixer, a new approach combining channel-compressed pretraining with TSMixer, enhancing forecasting accuracy and generalization for BizITObs data.

Findings

AutoMixer improves Biz-KPI forecasting accuracy by 11-15%.

The model effectively decouples useful and noisy channel interactions.

AutoMixer generalizes well across multiple downstream tasks.

Abstract

The efficiency of business processes relies on business key performance indicators (Biz-KPIs), that can be negatively impacted by IT failures. Business and IT Observability (BizITObs) data fuses both Biz-KPIs and IT event channels together as multivariate time series data. Forecasting Biz-KPIs in advance can enhance efficiency and revenue through proactive corrective measures. However, BizITObs data generally exhibit both useful and noisy inter-channel interactions between Biz-KPIs and IT events that need to be effectively decoupled. This leads to suboptimal forecasting performance when existing multivariate forecasting models are employed. To address this, we introduce AutoMixer, a time-series Foundation Model (FM) approach, grounded on the novel technique of channel-compressed pretrain and finetune workflows. AutoMixer leverages an AutoEncoder for channel-compressed pretraining and integrates it with the advanced TSMixer model for multivariate time series forecasting. This fusion greatly enhances the potency of TSMixer for accurate forecasts and also generalizes well across several downstream tasks. Through detailed experiments and dashboard analytics, we show AutoMixer's capability to consistently improve the Biz-KPI's forecasting accuracy (by 11-15\%) which directly translates to actionable business insights.