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Modern data acquisition routinely produce massive amounts of event sequence data in various domains, such as social media, healthcare, and financial markets. These data often ex- hibit complicated short-term and long-term temporal dependencies. However, most of the ex- isting recurrent neural network-based point process models fail to capture such dependencies, and yield unreliable prediction performance. To address this issue, we propose a Transformer Hawkes Process (THP) model, which leverages the self-attention mechanism to capture long- term dependencies and meanwhile enjoys computational efficiency. Numerical experiments on various datasets show that THP outperforms existing models in terms of both likelihood and event prediction accuracy by a notable margin. Moreover, THP is quite general and can incorpo- rate additional structural knowledge. We provide a concrete example, where THP achieves im- proved prediction performance for learning multiple point processes when incorporating their relational information.
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Sparse Transformer Hawkes Process for Long Event Sequences
Large quantities of asynchronous event sequence data such as crime records, emergence call logs, and financial transactions are becoming increasingly available from various fields. These event sequences often exhibit both long-term and short-term temporal dependencies. Variations of neural network based temporal point processes have been widely used for modeling such asynchronous event sequences. However, many current architectures including attention based point processes struggle with long event sequences due to computational inefficiency. To tackle the challenge, we propose an efficient sparse transformer Hawkes process (STHP), which has two components. For the first component, a transformer with a novel temporal sparse self-attention mechanism is applied to event sequences with arbitrary intervals, mainly focusing on short-term dependencies. For the second component, a transformer is applied to the time series of aggregated event counts, primarily targeting the extraction of long-term periodic dependencies. Both components complement each other and are fused together to model the conditional intensity function of a point process for future event forecasting. Experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed STHP outperforms baselines and achieves significant improvement in computational efficiency without sacrificing prediction performance for long sequences.
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- PAR ID:
- 10471790
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: Research Track. ECML PKDD 2023
- ISSN:
- 978-3-031-43424-2
- ISBN:
- 978-3-031-43424-2
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43424-2_11
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43424-2_11
