SDD: Shape-aware Data-driven Attention Mechanism for Time Series Analysis
Yanyun Cao, Rundong Zuo, Rui Cao, Byron Koon Kau Choi, Jianliang Xu, Sourav Saha Bhowmick · 2025
Multivariate time series (mts ) analysis have extensive applications in various areas such as human activity recognition, healthcare, and economics, among others. Recently, Transformer approaches have been specifically designed for MTS and have consistently reported superior performance. In this paper, we demonstrate a software system for a recent efficient shape-aware Transformer (SDD ), where time-series subsequences (a.k.a shapes) are made available to users for investigation. First, a time-series Transformer, called SVP-T, takes shapes, together with their variable position information (VP information) as input to the training of a Transformer model. These shapes are computed from different variables and time intervals, enabling the Transformer model to learn dependencies simultaneously across both time and variables. Second, a data-driven kernel-based attention mechanism, called DARKER, reduces the time complexity of training Transformer models from O(N2) to O(N), where N is the number of inputs. As a result, the training process by using DARKER offers about 3x-4x speedup over vanilla Transformers'. In this demo, we present the first system (SDD ) that integrates SVP-T and DARKER. In particular, SDD visualizes the SVP-T's attention matrix and allows users to explore key shapes that have high attention weights. Furthermore, users can use SDD to decide the shape input to train a new model, to further balance between efficiency and accuracy.