Inter-Series Transformer: Attending to Products in Time Series Forecasting
This work addresses supply chain demand forecasting for companies, particularly in medical device manufacturing, but is incremental as it adapts existing Transformer methods to a specific domain.
The authors tackled supply chain demand forecasting by developing a Transformer-based approach with attention across time series to capture interactions and address sparsity, demonstrating competitive to superior performance on both private and public datasets.
Time series forecasting is an important task in many fields ranging from supply chain management to weather forecasting. Recently, Transformer neural network architectures have shown promising results in forecasting on common time series benchmark datasets. However, application to supply chain demand forecasting, which can have challenging characteristics such as sparsity and cross-series effects, has been limited. In this work, we explore the application of Transformer-based models to supply chain demand forecasting. In particular, we develop a new Transformer-based forecasting approach using a shared, multi-task per-time series network with an initial component applying attention across time series, to capture interactions and help address sparsity. We provide a case study applying our approach to successfully improve demand prediction for a medical device manufacturing company. To further validate our approach, we also apply it to public demand forecasting datasets as well and demonstrate competitive to superior performance compared to a variety of baseline and state-of-the-art forecast methods across the private and public datasets.