Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting plays a vital role in a wide range of applications. Recently, Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have become increasingly popular MTS forecasting methods due to their state-of-the-art performance. However, recent works are becoming more sophisticated with limited performance improvements. This phenomenon motivates us to explore the critical factors of MTS forecasting and design a model that is as powerful as STGNNs, but more concise and efficient. In this paper, we identify the indistinguishability of samples in both spatial and temporal dimensions as a key bottleneck, and propose a simple yet effective baseline for MTS forecasting by attaching Spatial and Temporal IDentity information (STID), which achieves the best performance and efficiency simultaneously based on simple Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). These results suggest that we can design efficient and effective models as long as they solve the indistinguishability of samples, without being limited to STGNNs.
@article{arxiv.2208.05233,
title = {Spatial-Temporal Identity: A Simple yet Effective Baseline for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting},
author = {Zezhi Shao and Zhao Zhang and Fei Wang and Wei Wei and Yongjun Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.05233},
year = {2022}
}