XicorAttention: Time Series Transformer Using Attention with Nonlinear Correlation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kimura, Daichi, Izumitani, Tomonori, Kashima, Hisashi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kimura, Daichi
Izumitani, Tomonori
Kashima, Hisashi
author_facet Kimura, Daichi
Izumitani, Tomonori
Kashima, Hisashi
contents Various Transformer-based models have been proposed for time series forecasting. These models leverage the self-attention mechanism to capture long-term temporal or variate dependencies in sequences. Existing methods can be divided into two approaches: (1) reducing computational cost of attention by making the calculations sparse, and (2) reshaping the input data to aggregate temporal features. However, existing attention mechanisms may not adequately capture inherent nonlinear dependencies present in time series data, leaving room for improvement. In this study, we propose a novel attention mechanism based on Chatterjee's rank correlation coefficient, which measures nonlinear dependencies between variables. Specifically, we replace the matrix multiplication in standard attention mechanisms with this rank coefficient to measure the query-key relationship. Since computing Chatterjee's correlation coefficient involves sorting and ranking operations, we introduce a differentiable approximation employing SoftSort and SoftRank. Our proposed mechanism, ``XicorAttention,'' integrates it into several state-of-the-art Transformer models. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that incorporating nonlinear correlation into the attention improves forecasting accuracy by up to approximately 9.1\% compared to existing models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02694
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle XicorAttention: Time Series Transformer Using Attention with Nonlinear Correlation
Kimura, Daichi
Izumitani, Tomonori
Kashima, Hisashi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Various Transformer-based models have been proposed for time series forecasting. These models leverage the self-attention mechanism to capture long-term temporal or variate dependencies in sequences. Existing methods can be divided into two approaches: (1) reducing computational cost of attention by making the calculations sparse, and (2) reshaping the input data to aggregate temporal features. However, existing attention mechanisms may not adequately capture inherent nonlinear dependencies present in time series data, leaving room for improvement. In this study, we propose a novel attention mechanism based on Chatterjee's rank correlation coefficient, which measures nonlinear dependencies between variables. Specifically, we replace the matrix multiplication in standard attention mechanisms with this rank coefficient to measure the query-key relationship. Since computing Chatterjee's correlation coefficient involves sorting and ranking operations, we introduce a differentiable approximation employing SoftSort and SoftRank. Our proposed mechanism, ``XicorAttention,'' integrates it into several state-of-the-art Transformer models. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that incorporating nonlinear correlation into the attention improves forecasting accuracy by up to approximately 9.1\% compared to existing models.
title XicorAttention: Time Series Transformer Using Attention with Nonlinear Correlation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02694