# SageFormer: Series-Aware Framework for Long-term Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01616 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01616/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02186/) (2022)
- [DeepAR: Probabilistic Forecasting with Autoregressive Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04110/) (2017)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Time Series Forecasting With Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13408/) (2020)
- [SCINet: Time Series Modeling and Forecasting with Sample Convolution and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09305/) (2021)
- [Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07719/) (2021)
- [CayleyNets: Graph Convolutional Neural Networks with Complex Rational Spectral Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07664/) (2017)
- [Think Globally, Act Locally: A Deep Neural Network Approach to High-Dimensional Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03806/) (2019)
- [The Capacity and Robustness Trade-off: Revisiting the Channel Independent Strategy for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05206/) (2023)
- [MTS-Mixers: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Factorized Temporal and Channel Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04501/) (2023)
- [Long-Range Transformers for Dynamic Spatiotemporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12218/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [SegRNN: Segment Recurrent Neural Network for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11200/) (2023)
- [Times2D: Multi-Period Decomposition and Derivative Mapping for General Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00118/) (2025)
- [FCPCA: Fuzzy clustering of high-dimensional time series based on common principal component analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07276/) (2025)
- [WaveRoRA: Wavelet Rotary Route Attention for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22649/) (2024)
- [PIPE: Physics-Informed Position Encoding for Alignment of Satellite Images and Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14786/) (2025)
- [Stage-Diff: Stage-wise Long-Term Time Series Generation Based on Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21330/) (2025)
- [TimePerceiver: An Encoder-Decoder Framework for Generalized Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22550/) (2025)
- [LightSAE: Parameter-Efficient and Heterogeneity-Aware Embedding for IoT Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10465/) (2025)
- [AWEMixer: Adaptive Wavelet-Enhanced Mixer Network for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04722/) (2025)
- [Multiple cyclicity and Wavelet Decomposition with Channel Correlation for Long-term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17996/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the burgeoning ecosystem of Internet of Things, multivariate time series (MTS) data has become ubiquitous, highlighting the fundamental role of time series forecasting across numerous applications. The crucial challenge of long-term MTS forecasting requires adept models capable of capturing both intra- and inter-series dependencies. Recent advancements in deep learning, notably Transformers, have shown promise. However, many prevailing methods either marginalize inter-series dependencies or overlook them entirely. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel series-aware framework, explicitly designed to emphasize the significance of such dependencies. At the heart of this framework lies our specific implementation: the SageFormer. As a Series-aware Graph-enhanced Transformer model, SageFormer proficiently discerns and models the intricate relationships between series using graph structures. Beyond capturing diverse temporal patterns, it also curtails redundant information across series. Notably, the series-aware framework seamlessly integrates with existing Transformer-based models, enriching their ability to comprehend inter-series relationships. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets validate the superior performance of SageFormer against contemporary state-of-the-art approaches.