Enhancing Channel-Independent Time Series Forecasting via Cross-Variate Patch Embedding

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Hauptverfasser: Shin, Donghwa, Zhang, Edwin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Shin, Donghwa
Zhang, Edwin
author_facet Shin, Donghwa
Zhang, Edwin
contents Transformers have recently gained popularity in time series forecasting due to their ability to capture long-term dependencies. However, many existing models focus only on capturing temporal dependencies while omitting intricate relationships between variables. Recent models have tried tackling this by explicitly modeling both cross-time and cross-variate dependencies through a sequential or unified attention mechanism, but they are entirely channel dependent (CD) across all layers, making them potentially susceptible to overfitting. To address this, we propose Cross-Variate Patch Embeddings (CVPE), a lightweight CD module that injects cross-variate context into channel-independent (CI) models by simply modifying the patch embedding process. We achieve this by adding a learnable positional encoding and a lightweight router-attention block to the vanilla patch embedding layer. We then integrate CVPE into Time-LLM, a multimodal CI forecasting model, to demonstrate its effectiveness in capturing cross-variate dependencies and enhance the CI model's performance. Extensive experimental results on seven real-world datasets show that our enhanced Time-LLM outperforms the original baseline model simply by incorporating the CVPE module, with no other changes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12761
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Channel-Independent Time Series Forecasting via Cross-Variate Patch Embedding
Shin, Donghwa
Zhang, Edwin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Transformers have recently gained popularity in time series forecasting due to their ability to capture long-term dependencies. However, many existing models focus only on capturing temporal dependencies while omitting intricate relationships between variables. Recent models have tried tackling this by explicitly modeling both cross-time and cross-variate dependencies through a sequential or unified attention mechanism, but they are entirely channel dependent (CD) across all layers, making them potentially susceptible to overfitting. To address this, we propose Cross-Variate Patch Embeddings (CVPE), a lightweight CD module that injects cross-variate context into channel-independent (CI) models by simply modifying the patch embedding process. We achieve this by adding a learnable positional encoding and a lightweight router-attention block to the vanilla patch embedding layer. We then integrate CVPE into Time-LLM, a multimodal CI forecasting model, to demonstrate its effectiveness in capturing cross-variate dependencies and enhance the CI model's performance. Extensive experimental results on seven real-world datasets show that our enhanced Time-LLM outperforms the original baseline model simply by incorporating the CVPE module, with no other changes.
title Enhancing Channel-Independent Time Series Forecasting via Cross-Variate Patch Embedding
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12761