Advancing Enterprise Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Applications: Data Mining Meets Instruction Tuning of Language Models For Multi-modal Time Series Analysis in Low-Resource Settings

Abstract

Spatio-temporal forecasting is crucial in transportation, logistics, and supply chain management. However, current methods struggle with large, complex datasets. We propose a dynamic, multi-modal approach that integrates the strengths of traditional forecasting methods and instruction tuning of small language models for time series trend analysis. This approach utilizes a mixture of experts (MoE) architecture with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, tailored for consumer hardware to scale up AI solutions in low resource settings while balancing performance and latency tradeoffs. Additionally, our approach leverages related past experiences for similar input time series to efficiently handle both intra-series and inter-series dependencies of non-stationary data with a time-then-space modeling approach, using grouped-query attention, while mitigating the limitations of traditional forecasting techniques in handling distributional shifts. Our approach models predictive uncertainty to improve decision-making. Our framework enables on-premises customization with reduced computational and memory demands, while maintaining inference speed and data privacy/security. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework provides robust and accurate forecasts, significantly outperforming existing methods.