Learning Temporal Saliency for Time Series Forecasting with Cross-Scale Attention

Abstract

Explainability in time series forecasting is essential for improving model transparency and supporting informed decision-making. In this work, we present CrossScaleNet, an innovative architecture that combines a patch-based cross-attention mechanism with multi-scale processing to achieve both high performance and enhanced temporal explainability. By embedding attention mechanisms into the training process, our model provides intrinsic explainability for temporal saliency, making its decision-making process more transparent. Traditional post-hoc methods for temporal saliency detection are computationally expensive, particularly when compared to feature importance detection. While ablation techniques may suffice for datasets with fewer features, identifying temporal saliency poses greater challenges due to its complexity. We validate CrossScaleNet on synthetic datasets with known saliency ground truth and on established public benchmarks, demonstrating the robustness of our method in identifying temporal saliency. Experiments on real-world datasets for forecasting task show that our approach consistently outperforms most transformer-based models, offering better explainability without sacrificing predictive accuracy. Our evaluations demonstrate superior performance in both temporal saliency detection and forecasting accuracy. Moreover, we highlight that existing models claiming explainability often fail to maintain strong performance on standard benchmarks. CrossScaleNet addresses this gap, offering a balanced approach that captures temporal saliency effectively while delivering state-of-the-art forecasting performance across datasets of varying complexity.