Autoregressive Denoising Diffusion Models for Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

In this work, we propose TimeGrad, an autoregressive model for multivariate probabilistic time series forecasting which samples from the data distribution at each time step by estimating its gradient. To this end, we use diffusion probabilistic models, a class of latent variable models closely connected to score matching and energy-based methods. Our model learns gradients by optimizing a variational bound on the data likelihood and at inference time converts white noise into a sample of the distribution of interest through a Markov chain using Langevin sampling. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed autoregressive denoising diffusion model is the new state-of-the art multivariate probabilistic forecasting method on real-world data sets with thousands of correlated dimensions. We hope that this method is a useful tool for practitioners and lays the foundation for future research in this area.