Sequence Complementor: Complementing Transformers For Time Series Forecasting with Learnable Sequences

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Xiwen, Qiu, Peijie, Zhu, Wenhui, Li, Huayu, Wang, Hao, Sotiras, Aristeidis, Wang, Yalin, Razi, Abolfazl
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913636872617984
author Chen, Xiwen
Qiu, Peijie
Zhu, Wenhui
Li, Huayu
Wang, Hao
Sotiras, Aristeidis
Wang, Yalin
Razi, Abolfazl
author_facet Chen, Xiwen
Qiu, Peijie
Zhu, Wenhui
Li, Huayu
Wang, Hao
Sotiras, Aristeidis
Wang, Yalin
Razi, Abolfazl
contents Since its introduction, the transformer has shifted the development trajectory away from traditional models (e.g., RNN, MLP) in time series forecasting, which is attributed to its ability to capture global dependencies within temporal tokens. Follow-up studies have largely involved altering the tokenization and self-attention modules to better adapt Transformers for addressing special challenges like non-stationarity, channel-wise dependency, and variable correlation in time series. However, we found that the expressive capability of sequence representation is a key factor influencing Transformer performance in time forecasting after investigating several representative methods, where there is an almost linear relationship between sequence representation entropy and mean square error, with more diverse representations performing better. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism with Sequence Complementors and prove feasible from an information theory perspective, where these learnable sequences are able to provide complementary information beyond current input to feed attention. We further enhance the Sequence Complementors via a diversification loss that is theoretically covered. The empirical evaluation of both long-term and short-term forecasting has confirmed its superiority over the recent state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_02735
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sequence Complementor: Complementing Transformers For Time Series Forecasting with Learnable Sequences
Chen, Xiwen
Qiu, Peijie
Zhu, Wenhui
Li, Huayu
Wang, Hao
Sotiras, Aristeidis
Wang, Yalin
Razi, Abolfazl
Machine Learning
Since its introduction, the transformer has shifted the development trajectory away from traditional models (e.g., RNN, MLP) in time series forecasting, which is attributed to its ability to capture global dependencies within temporal tokens. Follow-up studies have largely involved altering the tokenization and self-attention modules to better adapt Transformers for addressing special challenges like non-stationarity, channel-wise dependency, and variable correlation in time series. However, we found that the expressive capability of sequence representation is a key factor influencing Transformer performance in time forecasting after investigating several representative methods, where there is an almost linear relationship between sequence representation entropy and mean square error, with more diverse representations performing better. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism with Sequence Complementors and prove feasible from an information theory perspective, where these learnable sequences are able to provide complementary information beyond current input to feed attention. We further enhance the Sequence Complementors via a diversification loss that is theoretically covered. The empirical evaluation of both long-term and short-term forecasting has confirmed its superiority over the recent state-of-the-art methods.
title Sequence Complementor: Complementing Transformers For Time Series Forecasting with Learnable Sequences
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02735