MPformer: A Transformer-Based Model for Earthen Ruins Climate Prediction

Earthen ruins contain rich historical value. Affected by wind speed, temperature, and other factors, their survival conditions are not optimistic. Time series prediction provides more information for ruins protection. This work includes two challenges: (1) The ruin is located in an open environment, causing complex nonlinear temporal patterns. Furthermore, the usual wind speed monitoring requires the 10 meters observation height to reduce the influence of terrain. However, in order to monitor wind speed around the ruin, we have to set 4.5 meters observation height according to the ruin, resulting in a non-periodic and oscillating temporal pattern of wind speed; (2) The ruin is located in the arid and uninhabited region of northwest China, which results in accelerating aging of equipment and difficulty in maintenance. It significantly amplifies the device error rate, leading to duplication, missing, and outliers in datasets. To address these challenges, we designed a complete preprocessing and a Transformer-based multi-channel patch model. Experimental results on four datasets that we collected show that our model outperforms the others. Ruins climate prediction model can timely and effectively predict the abnormal state of the environment of the ruins. This provides effective data support and decision-making for ruins conservation, and exploring the relationship between the environmental conditions and the living state of the earthen ruins.