Multi-Attention Recurrent Neural Network for Multi-Step Prediction of Chlorophyll Concentration

Chlorophyll prediction facilitates the comprehension of red tide characteristics and enables early warning. In practice, it is formulated as a multivariate time series forecasting problem aimed at forecasting future chlorophyll concentrations by considering both exogenous factors and chlorophyll. However, the multi-step prediction of chlorophyll concentration poses a formidable challenge due to the intricate interaction between factors and the long temporal dependence between input sequences. In this work, we propose a Multi-attention Recurrent Neural Network (MaRNN) for the multi-step prediction of chlorophyll concentration. The MaRNN comprises an encoder incorporating two-stage spatial attention and a decoder employing temporal attention. The encoder first learns the significance of exogenous factors for prediction in the first phase, and subsequently captures the spatial correlation between the exogenous sequence and chlorophyll sequence in the second phase. The decoder further excavates input sequences that exhibit a strong correlation with the task through temporal attention module, thereby enhancing the prediction accuracy of the model. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets reveal that MaRNN not only surpasses state-of-the-art methods in performance, but also offers interpretability for chlorophyll prediction.