A Novel Encoder-Decoder Model for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

The time series is a kind of complex structure data, which contains some special characteristics such as high dimension, dynamic, and high noise. Moreover, multivariate time series (MTS) has become a crucial study in data mining. The MTS utilizes the historical data to forecast its variation trend and has turned into one of the hotspots. In the era of rapid information development and big data, accurate prediction of MTS has attracted much attention. In this paper, a novel deep learning architecture based on the encoder-decoder framework is proposed for MTS forecasting. In this architecture, firstly, the gated recurrent unit (GRU) is taken as the main unit structure of both the procedures in encoding and decoding to extract the useful successive feature information. Then, different from the existing models, the attention mechanism (AM) is introduced to exploit the importance of different historical data for reconstruction at the decoding stage. Meanwhile, feature reuse is realized by skip connections based on the residual network for alleviating the influence of previous features on data reconstruction. Finally, in order to enhance the performance and the discriminative ability of the new MTS, the convolutional structure and fully connected module are established. Furthermore, to better validate the effectiveness of MTS forecasting, extensive experiments are executed on two different types of MTS such as stock data and shared bicycle data, respectively. The experimental results adequately demonstrate the effectiveness and the feasibility of the proposed method.