STDNet: A Spatio-Temporal Decomposition Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Long-term multivariate time series forecasting is an important task in engineering applications. It helps grasp the future development trend of data in real-time, which is of great significance for a wide variety of fields. Due to the non-linear and unstable characteristics of multivariate time series, the existing methods encounter difficulties in analyzing complex high-dimensional data and capturing latent relationships between multivariates in time series, thus affecting the performance of long-term prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel time series forecasting model based on multilayer perceptron that combines spatio-temporal decomposition and doubly residual stacking, namely Spatio-Temporal Decomposition Neural Network (STDNet). We decompose the originally complex and unstable time series into two parts, temporal term and spatial term. We design temporal module based on auto-correlation mechanism to discover temporal dependencies at the sub-series level, and spatial module based on convolutional neural network and self-attention mechanism to integrate multivariate information from two dimensions, global and local, respectively. Then we integrate the results obtained from the different modules to get the final forecast. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that STDNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, which provides an effective solution for long-term time series forecasting.