Shusen Ma

Shusen Ma, Yu Kang, Peng Bai et al.

In multivariate time-series forecasting (MTSF), extracting the temporal correlations of the input sequences is crucial. While popular Transformer-based predictive models can perform well, their quadratic computational complexity results in inefficiency and high overhead. The recently emerged Mamba, a selective state space model, has shown promising results in many fields due to its strong temporal feature extraction capabilities and linear computational complexity. However, due to the unilateral nature of Mamba, channel-independent predictive models based on Mamba cannot attend to the relationships among all variables in the manner of Transformer-based models. To address this issue, we combine fast-attention with Mamba to introduce a novel framework named FMamba for MTSF. Technically, we first extract the temporal features of the input variables through an embedding layer, then compute the dependencies among input variables via the fast-attention module. Subsequently, we use Mamba to selectively deal with the input features and further extract the temporal dependencies of the variables through the multi-layer perceptron block (MLP-block). Finally, FMamba obtains the predictive results through the projector, a linear layer. Experimental results on eight public datasets demonstrate that FMamba can achieve state-of-the-art performance while maintaining low computational overhead.

Tianhao Zhang, Shusen Ma, Yu Kang et al.

Multivariate time-series forecasting, as a typical problem in the field of time series prediction, has a wide range of applications in weather forecasting, traffic flow prediction, and other scenarios. However, existing works do not effectively consider the impact of extraneous variables on the prediction of the target variable. On the other hand, they fail to fully extract complex sequence information based on various time patterns of the sequences. To address these drawbacks, we propose a DA-SPS model, which adopts different modules for feature extraction based on the information characteristics of different variables. DA-SPS mainly consists of two stages: the target variable processing stage (TVPS) and the extraneous variables processing stage (EVPS). In TVPS, the model first uses Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) to process the target variable sequence and then uses Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and P-Conv-LSTM which deploys a patching strategy to extract features from trend and seasonality components, respectively. In EVPS, the model filters extraneous variables that have a strong correlation with the target variate by using Spearman correlation analysis and further analyses them using the L-Attention module which consists of LSTM and attention mechanism. Finally, the results obtained by TVPS and EVPS are combined through weighted summation and linear mapping to produce the final prediction. The results on four public datasets demonstrate that the DA-SPS model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, its performance in real-world scenarios is further validated using a private dataset collected by ourselves, which contains the test items' information on laptop motherboards.

Shusen Ma, Tianhao Zhang, Qijiu Xia et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) often faces challenges from missing variables, which hinder conventional spatial-temporal graph neural networks in modeling inter-variable correlations. While GinAR addresses variable missing using attention-based imputation and adaptive graph learning for the first time, it lacks interpretability and fails to capture more latent temporal patterns due to its simple recursive units (RUs). To overcome these limitations, we propose the Interpretable Bidirectional-modeling Network (IBN), integrating Uncertainty-Aware Interpolation (UAI) and Gaussian kernel-based Graph Convolution (GGCN). IBN estimates the uncertainty of reconstructed values using MC Dropout and applies an uncertainty-weighted strategy to mitigate high-risk reconstructions. GGCN explicitly models spatial correlations among variables, while a bidirectional RU enhances temporal dependency modeling. Extensive experiments show that IBN achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance under various missing-rate scenarios, providing a more reliable and interpretable framework for MTSF with missing variables. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhangth1211/NICLab-IBN.

Bing Fan, Shusen Ma, Yun-Bo Zhao et al.

In multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF), existing strategies for processing sequences are typically categorized as channel-independent and channel-mixing. The former treats all temporal information of each variable as a token, focusing on capturing local temporal features of individual variables, while the latter constructs a token from the multivariate information at each time step, emphasizing the modeling of global temporal dependencies. Current mainstream models are mostly based on Transformer and the emerging Mamba. Transformers excel at modeling global dependencies through self-attention mechanisms but exhibit limited sensitivity to local temporal patterns and suffer from quadratic computational complexity, restricting their efficiency in long-sequence processing. In contrast, Mamba, based on state space models (SSMs), achieves linear complexity and efficient long-range modeling but struggles to aggregate global contextual information in parallel. To overcome the limitations of both models, we propose DC-Mamber, a dual-channel forecasting model based on Mamba and linear Transformer for time series forecasting. Specifically, the Mamba-based channel employs a channel-independent strategy to extract intra-variable features, while the Transformer-based channel adopts a channel-mixing strategy to model cross-timestep global dependencies. DC-Mamber first maps the raw input into two distinct feature representations via separate embedding layers. These representations are then processed by a variable encoder (built on Mamba) and a temporal encoder (built on linear Transformer), respectively. Finally, a fusion layer integrates the dual-channel features for prediction. Extensive experiments on eight public datasets confirm DC-Mamber's superior accuracy over existing models.