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With the advancement of sensing technology, multivariate time series classification (MTSC) has recently received considerable attention. Existing deep learning-based MTSC techniques, which mostly rely on convolutional or recurrent neural networks, are primarily concerned with the temporal dependency of single time series. As a result, they struggle to express pairwise dependencies among multivariate variables directly. Furthermore, current spatial-temporal modeling (e.g., graph classification) methodologies based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are inherently flat and cannot aggregate hub data in a hierarchical manner. To address these limitations, we propose a novel graph pooling-based framework MTPool to obtain the expressive global representation of MTS. We first convert MTS slices to graphs by utilizing interactions of variables via graph structure learning module and attain the spatial-temporal graph node features via temporal convolutional module. To get global graph-level representation, we design an "encoder-decoder" based variational graph pooling module for creating adaptive centroids for cluster assignments. Then we combine GNNs and our proposed variational graph pooling layers for joint graph representation learning and graph coarsening, after which the graph is progressively coarsened to one node. At last, a differentiable classifier takes this coarsened representation to get the final predicted class. Experiments on ten benchmark datasets exhibit MTPool outperforms state-of-the-art strategies in the MTSC task.

Multivariate time series forecasting, which analyzes historical time series to predict future trends, can effectively help decision-making. Complex relations among variables in MTS, including static, dynamic, predictable, and latent relations, have made it possible to mining more features of MTS. Modeling complex relations are not only essential in characterizing latent dependency as well as modeling temporal dependence but also brings great challenges in the MTS forecasting task. However, existing methods mainly focus on modeling certain relations among MTS variables. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning model, termed Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (MTHetGNN). To characterize complex relations among variables, a relation embedding module is designed in MTHetGNN, where each variable is regarded as a graph node, and each type of edge represents a specific static or dynamic relationship. Meanwhile, a temporal embedding module is introduced for time series features extraction, where involving convolutional neural network (CNN) filters with different perception scales. Finally, a heterogeneous graph embedding module is adopted to handle the complex structural information generated by the two modules. Three benchmark datasets from the real world are used to evaluate the proposed MTHetGNN. The comprehensive experiments show that MTHetGNN achieves state-of-the-art results in the MTS forecasting task.

Multivariate time series forecasting is widely used in various fields. Reasonable prediction results can assist people in planning and decision-making, generate benefits and avoid risks. Normally, there are two characteristics of time series, that is, long-term trend and short-term fluctuation. For example, stock prices will have a long-term upward trend with the market, but there may be a small decline in the short term. These two characteristics are often relatively independent of each other. However, the existing prediction methods often do not distinguish between them, which reduces the accuracy of the prediction model. In this paper, a MTS forecasting framework that can capture the long-term trends and short-term fluctuations of time series in parallel is proposed. This method uses the original time series and its first difference to characterize long-term trends and short-term fluctuations. Three prediction sub-networks are constructed to predict long-term trends, short-term fluctuations and the final value to be predicted. In the overall optimization goal, the idea of multi-task learning is used for reference, which is to make the prediction results of long-term trends and short-term fluctuations as close to the real values as possible while requiring to approximate the values to be predicted. In this way, the proposed method uses more supervision information and can more accurately capture the changing trend of the time series, thereby improving the forecasting performance.