Enhancing Transformer Efficiency for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Abstract: Most current multivariate time series (MTS) classification algorithms focus on improving the predictive accuracy. However, for large-scale (either high-dimensional or long-sequential) time series (TS) datasets, there is an additional consideration: to design an efficient network architecture to reduce computational costs such as training time and memory footprint. In this work we propose a methodology based on module-wise pruning and Pareto analysis to investigate the relationship between model efficiency and accuracy, as well as its complexity. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark MTS datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our method.