Decoupled Invariant Attention Network for Multivariate Time-series Forecasting

To achieve more accurate prediction results in Time Series Forecasting (TSF), it is essential to distinguish between the valuable patterns (invariant patterns) of the spatial-temporal relationship and the patterns that are prone to generate distribution shift (variant patterns), then combine them for forecasting.The existing works, such as transformer-based models and GNN-based models, focus on capturing main forecasting dependencies whether it is stable or not, and they tend to overlook patterns that carry both useful information and distribution shift. In this paper, we propose a model for better forecasting time series: Decoupled Invariant Attention Network (DIAN), which contains two modules to learn spatial and temporal relationships respectively: 1) Spatial Decoupled Invariant-Variant Learning (SDIVL) to decouple the spatial invariant and variant attention scores, and then leverage convolutional networks to effectively integrate them for subsequent layers; 2) Temporal Augmented Invariant-Variant Learning (TAIVL) to decouple temporal invariant and variant patterns and combine them for further forecasting.In this module, we also design Temporal Intervention Mechanism to create multiple intervened samples by reassembling variant patterns across time stamps to eliminate the spurious impacts of variant patterns.In addition, we propose Joint Optimization to minimize the loss function considering all invariant patterns, variant patterns and intervened patterns so that our model can gain a more stable predictive ability.Extensive experiments on five datasets have demonstrated our superior performance with higher efficiency compared with state-of-the-art methods.