AI × ECON · PAPER RECORDSOURCE-VERIFIED ABSTRACT

Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting

Bryan Lim · Sercan O. Ar · Nicolas Loeff · Tomas Pfister

International Journal of Forecasting

ORIGINAL ABSTRACT

Abstract

SOURCE-VERIFIED ABSTRACT

Multi-horizon forecasting often contains a complex mix of inputs - including static (i.e. time-invariant) covariates, known future inputs, and other exogenous time series that are only observed in the past - without any prior information on how they interact with the target. Several deep learning methods have been proposed, but they are typically black-box models that do not shed light on how they use the full range of inputs present in practical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) - a novel attention-based architecture that combines high-performance multi-horizon forecasting with interpretable insights into temporal dynamics. To learn temporal relationships at different scales, TFT uses recurrent layers for local processing and interpretable self-attention layers for long-term dependencies. TFT utilizes specialized components to select relevant features and a series of gating layers to suppress unnecessary components, enabling high performance in a wide range of scenarios. On a variety of real-world datasets, we demonstrate significant performance improvements over existing benchmarks, and highlight three practical interpretability use cases of TFT.