Towards Efficient Large Scale Spatial-Temporal Time Series Forecasting via Improved Inverted Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sun, Jiarui, Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael, Fan, Yujie, Dai, Xin, Fan, Xiran, Jiang, Zhimeng, Saini, Uday Singh, Lai, Vivian, Wang, Junpeng, Chen, Huiyuan, Zhuang, Zhongfang, Zheng, Yan, Chowdhary, Girish
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Sun, Jiarui
Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael
Fan, Yujie
Dai, Xin
Fan, Xiran
Jiang, Zhimeng
Saini, Uday Singh
Lai, Vivian
Wang, Junpeng
Chen, Huiyuan
Zhuang, Zhongfang
Zheng, Yan
Chowdhary, Girish
author_facet Sun, Jiarui
Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael
Fan, Yujie
Dai, Xin
Fan, Xiran
Jiang, Zhimeng
Saini, Uday Singh
Lai, Vivian
Wang, Junpeng
Chen, Huiyuan
Zhuang, Zhongfang
Zheng, Yan
Chowdhary, Girish
contents Time series forecasting at scale presents significant challenges for modern prediction systems, particularly when dealing with large sets of synchronized series, such as in a global payment network. In such systems, three key challenges must be overcome for accurate and scalable predictions: 1) emergence of new entities, 2) disappearance of existing entities, and 3) the large number of entities present in the data. The recently proposed Inverted Transformer (iTransformer) architecture has shown promising results by effectively handling variable entities. However, its practical application in large-scale settings is limited by quadratic time and space complexity ($O(N^2)$) with respect to the number of entities $N$. In this paper, we introduce EiFormer, an improved inverted transformer architecture that maintains the adaptive capabilities of iTransformer while reducing computational complexity to linear scale ($O(N)$). Our key innovation lies in restructuring the attention mechanism to eliminate redundant computations without sacrificing model expressiveness. Additionally, we incorporate a random projection mechanism that not only enhances efficiency but also improves prediction accuracy through better feature representation. Extensive experiments on the public LargeST benchmark dataset and a proprietary large-scale time series dataset demonstrate that EiFormer significantly outperforms existing methods in both computational efficiency and forecasting accuracy. Our approach enables practical deployment of transformer-based forecasting in industrial applications where handling time series at scale is essential.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10858
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Efficient Large Scale Spatial-Temporal Time Series Forecasting via Improved Inverted Transformers
Sun, Jiarui
Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael
Fan, Yujie
Dai, Xin
Fan, Xiran
Jiang, Zhimeng
Saini, Uday Singh
Lai, Vivian
Wang, Junpeng
Chen, Huiyuan
Zhuang, Zhongfang
Zheng, Yan
Chowdhary, Girish
Machine Learning
Time series forecasting at scale presents significant challenges for modern prediction systems, particularly when dealing with large sets of synchronized series, such as in a global payment network. In such systems, three key challenges must be overcome for accurate and scalable predictions: 1) emergence of new entities, 2) disappearance of existing entities, and 3) the large number of entities present in the data. The recently proposed Inverted Transformer (iTransformer) architecture has shown promising results by effectively handling variable entities. However, its practical application in large-scale settings is limited by quadratic time and space complexity ($O(N^2)$) with respect to the number of entities $N$. In this paper, we introduce EiFormer, an improved inverted transformer architecture that maintains the adaptive capabilities of iTransformer while reducing computational complexity to linear scale ($O(N)$). Our key innovation lies in restructuring the attention mechanism to eliminate redundant computations without sacrificing model expressiveness. Additionally, we incorporate a random projection mechanism that not only enhances efficiency but also improves prediction accuracy through better feature representation. Extensive experiments on the public LargeST benchmark dataset and a proprietary large-scale time series dataset demonstrate that EiFormer significantly outperforms existing methods in both computational efficiency and forecasting accuracy. Our approach enables practical deployment of transformer-based forecasting in industrial applications where handling time series at scale is essential.
title Towards Efficient Large Scale Spatial-Temporal Time Series Forecasting via Improved Inverted Transformers
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10858