# Rethinking Patch Based Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Semantic Structured Partitioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19966 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19966/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [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)
- [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)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [Non-stationary Transformers: Exploring the Stationarity in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14415/) (2022)
- [TFB: Towards Comprehensive and Fair Benchmarking of Time Series Forecasting Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20150/) (2024)
- [Exploring Progress in Multivariate Time Series Forecasting: Comprehensive Benchmarking and Heterogeneity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06119/) (2023)
- [DUET: Dual Clustering Enhanced Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10859/) (2024)
- [Pathformer: Multi-scale Transformers with Adaptive Pathways for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05956/) (2024)
- [CATCH: Channel-Aware multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection via Frequency Patching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12261/) (2024)
- [Fredformer: Frequency Debiased Transformer for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09009/) (2024)
- [DAG: A Dual Correlation Network for Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14933/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting: The Electric Load Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09207/) (2019)
- [Multi-Granularity Framework for Unsupervised Representation Learning of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07248/) (2023)
- [TiVaT: A Transformer with a Single Unified Mechanism for Capturing Asynchronous Dependencies in Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01531/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) is a fundamental task in many real world applications. Existing patch based forecasting methods generally fall into three categories: fixed partitioning, multi-scale partitioning, and extendable partitioning. Fixed partitioning often breaks meaningful temporal boundaries, multi-scale partitioning may introduce redundant representations across scales, and extendable partitioning improves flexibility but still lacks an explicit mechanism for organizing semantic structure and modeling interactions among heterogeneous temporal patterns. To address these limitations, we propose SCPaT, a Transformer based framework built on semantic structured partitioning. SCPaT first decomposes input sequences into semantically consistent units through adaptive semantic unit generation, then constructs a dynamic semantic graph to model directed dependencies among these units and organize them into higher order semantic blocks. Based on these structured representations, an importance aware routing mechanism adaptively dispatches different semantic blocks to different experts for customized modeling. Extensive experiments on 12 real world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SCPaT.