Gorbett, Matt, authorShirazi, Hossein, authorRay, Indrakshi, authorACM, publisher2024-11-112024-11-112023-08-04Matt Gorbett, Hossein Shirazi, and Indrakshi Ray. 2023. Sparse Binary Transformers for Multivariate Time Series Modeling. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '23), August 6–10, 2023, Long Beach, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3580305.3599508https://hdl.handle.net/10217/239532Compressed Neural Networks have the potential to enable deep learning across new applications and smaller computational environments. However, understanding the range of learning tasks in which such models can succeed is not well studied. In this work, we apply sparse and binary-weighted Transformers to multivariate time series problems, showing that the lightweight models achieve accuracy comparable to that of dense floating-point Transformers of the same structure. Our model achieves favorable results across three time series learning tasks: classification, anomaly detection, and single-step forecasting. Additionally, to reduce the computational complexity of the attention mechanism, we apply two modifications, which show little to no decline in model performance: 1) in the classification task, we apply a fixed mask to the query, key, and value activations, and 2) for forecasting and anomaly detection, which rely on predicting outputs at a single point in time, we propose an attention mask to allow computation only at the current time step. Together, each compression technique and attention modification substantially reduces the number of non-zero operations necessary in the Transformer. We measure the computational savings of our approach over a range of metrics including parameter count, bit size, and floating point operation (FLOPs) count, showing up to a 53x reduction in storage size and up to 10.5x reduction in FLOPs.born digitalarticleseng©Matt Gorbett, et al. ACM 2023. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in KDD '23, https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3580305.3599508.transformersparseprunedbinarydeep learningmultivariate time seriesanomaly detectionclassificationforecastinglottery ticket hypothesisTexthttps://doi.org/10.1145/3580305.3599508