MMformer with Adaptive Transferable Attention: Advancing Multivariate Time Series Forecasting for Environmental Applications

Environmental crisis remains a global challenge that affects public health and environmental quality. Despite extensive research, accurately forecasting environmental change trends to inform targeted policies and assess prediction efficiency remains elusive. Conventional methods for multivariate time series (MTS) analysis often fail to capture the complex dynamics of environmental change. To address this, we introduce an innovative meta-learning MTS model, MMformer with Adaptive Transferable Multi-head Attention (ATMA), which combines self-attention and meta-learning for enhanced MTS forecasting. Specifically, MMformer is used to model and predict the time series of seven air quality indicators across 331 cities in China from January 2018 to June 2021 and the time series of precipitation and temperature at 2415 monitoring sites during the summer (276 days) from 2012 to 2014, validating the network's ability to perform and forecast MTS data successfully. Experimental results demonstrate that in these datasets, the MMformer model reaching SOTA outperforms iTransformer, Transformer, and the widely used traditional time series prediction algorithm SARIMAX in the prediction of MTS, reducing by 50% in MSE, 20% in MAE as compared to others in air quality datasets, reducing by 20% in MAPE except SARIMAX. Compared with Transformer and SARIMAX in the climate datasets, MSE, MAE, and MAPE are decreased by 30%, and there is an improvement compared to iTransformer. This approach represents a significant advance in our ability to forecast and respond to dynamic environmental quality challenges in diverse urban and rural environments. Its predictive capabilities provide valuable public health and environmental quality information, informing targeted interventions.