MSTN: Fast and Efficient Multivariate Time Series Model

Abstract: Real-world time-series data is highly non stationary and complex in dynamics that operate across multiple timescales, ranging from fast, short-term changes to slow, long-term trends. Most existing models rely on fixed-scale structural priors, such as patch-based tokenization, fixed frequency transformations, or frozen backbone architectures. This often leads to over-regularization of temporal dynamics, which limits their ability to adaptively model the full spectrum of temporal variations and impairs their performance on unpredictable, Sudden, high-magnitude events. To address this, we introduce the Multi-scale Temporal Network (MSTN), a novel deep learning architecture founded on a hierarchical multi-scale and sequence modeling principle. The MSTN framework integrates: (i) a multi-scale convolutional encoder that constructs a hierarchical feature pyramid for local patterns (ii) a sequence modeling component for long-range temporal dependencies. We empirically validate this with BiLSTM and Transformer variants, establishing a flexible foundation for future architectural advancements. and (iii) a gated fusion mechanism augmented with squeeze-and-excitation (SE) and multi-head temporal attention (MHTA) for dynamic, context-aware feature integration. This design enables MSTN to adaptively model temporal patterns from milliseconds to long-range dependencies within a unified framework. Extensive evaluations across time-series long-horizon forecasting, imputation, classification and generalizability study demonstrate that MSTN achieves competitive state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, showing improvements over contemporary approaches including EMTSF, LLM4TS, HiMTM, TIME-LLM, MTST, SOFTS, iTransformer, TimesNet, and PatchTST. In total, MSTN establishes new SOTA performance on 24 of 32 benchmark datasets, demonstrating its consistent performance across diverse temporal tasks.