# From Similarity to Superiority: Channel Clustering for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01340 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01340/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01728/) (2023)
- [Transformers in Time Series: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07125/) (2022)
- [Time Series Forecasting With Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13408/) (2020)
- [Efficient Attention: Attention with Linear Complexities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01243/) (2018)
- [SCINet: Time Series Modeling and Forecasting with Sample Convolution and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09305/) (2021)
- [Long-term Forecasting with TiDE: Time-series Dense Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08424/) (2023)
- [TSMixer: An All-MLP Architecture for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06053/) (2023)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks for Time Series Forecasting: Current Status and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00590/) (2019)
- [Frequency-domain MLPs are More Effective Learners in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06184/) (2023)
- [Think Globally, Act Locally: A Deep Neural Network Approach to High-Dimensional Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03806/) (2019)
- [Less Is More: Fast Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Light Sampling-oriented MLP Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01186/) (2022)
- [FiLM: Frequency improved Legendre Memory Model for Long-term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08897/) (2022)
- [The Capacity and Robustness Trade-off: Revisiting the Channel Independent Strategy for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05206/) (2023)
- [Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervised Learning for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04475/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting: A Channel Strategy Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10721/) (2025)
- [DBLoss: Decomposition-based Loss Function for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23672/) (2025)
- [Patch-wise Structural Loss for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00877/) (2025)
- [ImageFlowNet: Forecasting Multiscale Image-Level Trajectories of Disease Progression with Irregularly-Sampled Longitudinal Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14794/) (2024)
- [Selective Learning for Deep Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25207/) (2025)
- [TRACE: Grounding Time Series in Context for Multimodal Embedding and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09114/) (2025)
- [ReFocus: Reinforcing Mid-Frequency and Key-Frequency Modeling for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16890/) (2025)
- [U-Cast: Learning Hierarchical Structures for High-Dimensional Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15119/) (2025)
- [How Different from the Past? Spatio-Temporal Time Series Forecasting with Self-Supervised Deviation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04908/) (2025)
- [LiNo: Advancing Recursive Residual Decomposition of Linear and Nonlinear Patterns for Robust Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17159/) (2024)
- [Dataset-Driven Channel Masks in Transformers for Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23222/) (2024)
- [Channel Normalization for Time Series Channel Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00432/) (2025)
- [Channel-aware Contrastive Conditional Diffusion for Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02168/) (2024)
- [Delayformer: spatiotemporal transformation for predicting high-dimensional dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11528/) (2025)
- [ProtoTS: Learning Hierarchical Prototypes for Explainable Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23159/) (2025)
- [Moving Beyond Functional Connectivity: Time-Series Modeling for fMRI-Based Brain Disorder Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08262/) (2026)
- [Routing Channel-Patch Dependencies in Time Series Forecasting with Graph Spectral Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13702/) (2026)
- [BrainStratify: Coarse-to-Fine Disentanglement of Intracranial Neural Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20480/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust Real-World Multivariate Time Series Forecasting: A Unified Framework for Dependency, Asynchrony, and Missingness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08660/) (2025)
- [HGTS-Former: Hierarchical HyperGraph Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02411/) (2025)
- [How Effective Are Time-Series Models for Precipitation Nowcasting? A Comprehensive Benchmark for GNSS-based Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25263/) (2025)
- [What If We Let Forecasting Forget? A Sparse Bottleneck for Cross-Variable Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08289/) (2026)
- [Nested Spatio-Temporal Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16447/) (2026)
- [L-Drive: Beyond a Single Mapping-Latent Context Drives Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17730/) (2026)
- [Two-stage hybrid models for enhancing forecasting accuracy on heterogeneous time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08600/) (2025)
- [Accurate and Efficient Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Offline Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05738/) (2025)
- [Multivariate Long-term Time Series Forecasting with Fourier Neural Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09174/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Relational Priming Improves Transformer in Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12196/) (2025)
- [Transformer Modeling for Both Scalability and Performance in Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19471/) (2025)
- [CATS-Linear: Classification Auxiliary Linear Model for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08661/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series forecasting has attracted significant attention in recent decades. Previous studies have demonstrated that the Channel-Independent (CI) strategy improves forecasting performance by treating different channels individually, while it leads to poor generalization on unseen instances and ignores potentially necessary interactions between channels. Conversely, the Channel-Dependent (CD) strategy mixes all channels with even irrelevant and indiscriminate information, which, however, results in oversmoothing issues and limits forecasting accuracy. There is a lack of channel strategy that effectively balances individual channel treatment for improved forecasting performance without overlooking essential interactions between channels. Motivated by our observation of a correlation between the time series model's performance boost against channel mixing and the intrinsic similarity on a pair of channels, we developed a novel and adaptable Channel Clustering Module (CCM). CCM dynamically groups channels characterized by intrinsic similarities and leverages cluster information instead of individual channel identities, combining the best of CD and CI worlds. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CCM can (1) boost the performance of CI and CD models by an average margin of 2.4% and 7.2% on long-term and short-term forecasting, respectively; (2) enable zero-shot forecasting with mainstream time series forecasting models; (3) uncover intrinsic time series patterns among channels and improve interpretability of complex time series models.