SageFormer: Series-Aware Graph-Enhanced Transformers for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting plays a critical role in diverse domains. While recent advancements in deep learning methods, especially Transformers, have shown promise, there remains a gap in addressing the significance of inter-series dependencies. This paper introduces SageFormer, a Series-aware Graph-enhanced Transformer model designed to effectively capture and model dependencies between series using graph structures. SageFormer tackles two key challenges: effectively representing diverse temporal patterns across series and mitigating redundant information among series. Importantly, the proposed series-aware framework seamlessly integrates with existing Transformer-based models, augmenting their ability to model inter-series dependencies. Through extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets, we showcase the superior performance of SageFormer compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches.