Channel-wise Influence: Estimating Data Influence for Multivariate Time Series

Abstract: The influence function, a technique from robust statistics, measures the impact on model parameters or related functions when training data is removed or modified. This effective and valuable post-hoc method allows for studying the interpretability of machine learning models without requiring costly model retraining. It would provide extensions like increasing model performance, improving model generalization, and offering interpretability. Recently, Multivariate Time Series (MTS) analysis has become an important yet challenging task, attracting significant attention. However, there is no preceding research on the influence functions of MTS to shed light on the effects of modifying the channel of training MTS. Given that each channel in an MTS plays a crucial role in its analysis, it is essential to characterize the influence of different channels. To fill this gap, we propose a channel-wise influence function, which is the first method that can estimate the influence of different channels in MTS, utilizing a first-order gradient approximation that leverages the more informative average gradient of the data set. Additionally, we demonstrate how this influence function can be used to estimate the impact of a channel in MTS. Finally, we validated the accuracy and effectiveness of our influence estimation function in critical MTS analysis tasks, such as MTS anomaly detection and MTS forecasting. According to abundant experiments on real-world dataset, the original influence function performs worse than our method and even fail for the channel pruning problem, which demonstrate the superiority and necessity of channel-wise influence function in MTS analysis tasks.