Leveraging Hybrid Deep Learning Models for Enhanced Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is crucial in various domains, ranging from finance and economics to weather prediction and supply chain management. Traditional statistical methods and machine learning models have been widely used for this task. However, they often face limitations in capturing complex temporal dependencies and handling multivariate time series data. In recent years, deep learning models have emerged as a promising solution for overcoming these limitations. This paper investigates how deep learning, specifically hybrid models, can enhance time series forecasting and address the shortcomings of traditional approaches. This dual capability handles intricate variable interdependencies and non-stationarities in multivariate forecasting. Our results show that the hybrid models achieved lower error rates and higher $$R^2$$ values, signifying their superior predictive performance and generalization capabilities. These architectures effectively extract spatial features and temporal dynamics in multivariate time series by combining convolutional and recurrent modules. This study evaluates deep learning models, specifically hybrid architectures, for multivariate time series forecasting. On two real-world datasets - Traffic Volume and Air Quality - the TCN-BiLSTM model achieved the best overall performance. For Traffic Volume, the TCN-BiLSTM model achieved an $$R^2$$ score of 0.976, and for Air Quality, it reached an $$R^2$$ score of 0.94. These results highlight the model’s effectiveness in leveraging the strengths of Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) for capturing multi-scale temporal patterns and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTMs) for retaining contextual information, thereby enhancing the accuracy of time series forecasting.