Efficient time series adaptive representation learning via Dynamic Routing Sparse Attention

Time series prediction plays a crucial role in various fields but also faces significant challenges. Converting original 1D time series data into 2D data through dimension transformation allows capturing more hidden features but incurs high memory consumption and low time efficiency. We have designed a sparse attention mechanism with dynamic routing perception called Dynamic Routing Sparse Attention (DRSA) to address these issues. Specifically, DRSA can effectively handle variations of complex time series data. Meanwhile, under memory constraints, the Dynamic Routing Filter (DRF) module further refines it by filtering the blocked 2D time series data to identify the most relevant feature vectors in the local context. We conducted predictive experiments on six real-world time series datasets with fine granularity and long sequence dependencies. Compared to eight state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, DRSA demonstrated relative improvements ranging from 4.18% to 81.02%. Furthermore, its time efficiency is 2 to 5 times higher than the baseline. Our code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/wwy8/DRSA_main.