With the sweeping digitalization of societal, medical, industrial, and scientific processes, sensing technologies are being deployed that produce increasing volumes of time series data, thus fueling a plethora of new or improved applications. In this setting, outlier detection is frequently important, and while solutions based on neural networks exist, they leave room for improvement in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. With the objective of achieving such improvements, we propose a diversity-driven, convolutional ensemble. To improve accuracy, the ensemble employs multiple basic outlier detection models built on convolutional sequence-to-sequence autoencoders that can capture temporal dependencies in time series. Further, a novel diversity-driven training method maintains diversity among the basic models, with the aim of improving the ensemble's accuracy. To improve efficiency, the approach enables a high degree of parallelism during training. In addition, it is able to transfer some model parameters from one basic model to another, which reduces training time. We report on extensive experiments using real-world multivariate time series that offer insight into the design choices underlying the new approach and offer evidence that it is capable of improved accuracy and efficiency.
Multivariate time series forecasting has been drawing increasing attention due to its prevalent applications. It has been commonly assumed that leveraging latent dependencies between pairs of variables can enhance prediction accuracy. However, most existing methods suffer from static variable relevance modeling and ignorance of correlation between temporal scales, thereby failing to fully retain the dynamic and periodic interdependencies among variables, which are vital for long- and short-term forecasting. In this paper, we propose METRO, a generic framework with multi-scale temporal graphs neural networks, which models the dynamic and cross-scale variable correlations simultaneously. By representing the multivariate time series as a series of temporal graphs, both intra- and inter-step correlations can be well preserved via message-passing and node embedding update. To enable information propagation across temporal scales, we design a novel sampling strategy to align specific steps between higher and lower scales and fuse the cross-scale information efficiently. Moreover, we provide a modular interpretation of existing GNN-based time series forecasting works as specific instances under our framework. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. METRO has been successfully deployed onto the time series analytics platform of Huawei Cloud, where a one-month online test demonstrated that up to 20% relative improvement over state-of-the-art models w.r.t. RSE can be achieved.
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