Transformer-based models have emerged as powerful tools for multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF). However, existing Transformer models often fall short of capturing both intricate dependencies across variate and temporal dimensions in MTS data. Some recent models are proposed to separately capture variate and temporal dependencies through either two sequential or parallel attention mechanisms. However, these methods cannot directly and explicitly learn the intricate inter-series and intra-series dependencies. In this work, we first demonstrate that these dependencies are very important as they usually exist in real-world data. To directly model these dependencies, we propose a transformer-based model UniTST containing a unified attention mechanism on the flattened patch tokens. Additionally, we add a dispatcher module which reduces the complexity and makes the model feasible for a potentially large number of variates. Although our proposed model employs a simple architecture, it offers compelling performance as shown in our extensive experiments on several datasets for time series forecasting.

通过提出一种名为UniTST的基于Transformer的模型，该模型含有统一的关注机制和调度模块，可以直接建模时间序列数据中的复杂依赖关系，并在多个数据集上展现了出色的性能。

UniTST: 有效建模多变量时间序列预测中的系列内和系列间依赖关系