English

Taylorformer: Probabilistic Modelling for Random Processes including Time Series

Machine Learning 2024-09-24 v2

Abstract

We propose the Taylorformer for random processes such as time series. Its two key components are: 1) the LocalTaylor wrapper which adapts Taylor approximations (used in dynamical systems) for use in neural network-based probabilistic models, and 2) the MHA-X attention block which makes predictions in a way inspired by how Gaussian Processes' mean predictions are linear smoothings of contextual data. Taylorformer outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of log-likelihood on 5/6 classic Neural Process tasks such as meta-learning 1D functions, and has at least a 14\% MSE improvement on forecasting tasks, including electricity, oil temperatures and exchange rates. Taylorformer approximates a consistent stochastic process and provides uncertainty-aware predictions. Our code is provided in the supplementary material.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.19141,
  title  = {Taylorformer: Probabilistic Modelling for Random Processes including Time Series},
  author = {Omer Nivron and Raghul Parthipan and Damon J. Wischik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.19141},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Presented at ICML 2023, New Frontiers in Learning, Control, and Dynamical Systems Workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:50:49.194Z