UniTST: Effectively Modeling Inter-Series and Intra-Series Dependencies for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

TL;DR

UniTST is a transformer-based model that effectively captures both inter-series and intra-series dependencies in multivariate time series forecasting, improving performance with a unified attention mechanism and a dispatcher module.

Contribution

The paper introduces UniTST, a novel transformer model with a unified attention mechanism and dispatcher module for explicit modeling of complex dependencies in MTSF.

Findings

Outperforms existing models on multiple datasets

Effectively captures intricate inter- and intra-series dependencies

Maintains computational feasibility for large variate sets

Abstract

Transformer-based models have emerged as powerful tools for multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF). However, existing Transformer models often fall short of capturing both intricate dependencies across variate and temporal dimensions in MTS data. Some recent models are proposed to separately capture variate and temporal dependencies through either two sequential or parallel attention mechanisms. However, these methods cannot directly and explicitly learn the intricate inter-series and intra-series dependencies. In this work, we first demonstrate that these dependencies are very important as they usually exist in real-world data. To directly model these dependencies, we propose a transformer-based model UniTST containing a unified attention mechanism on the flattened patch tokens. Additionally, we add a dispatcher module which reduces the complexity and makes the model feasible for a potentially large number of variates. Although our proposed model employs a simple architecture, it offers compelling performance as shown in our extensive experiments on several datasets for time series forecasting.