MGTS-Net: Exploring Graph-Enhanced Multimodal Fusion for Augmented Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

Recent research in time series forecasting has explored integrating multimodal features into models to improve accuracy. However, the accuracy of such methods is constrained by three key challenges: inadequate extraction of fine-grained temporal patterns, suboptimal integration of multimodal information, and limited adaptability to dynamic multi-scale features. To address these problems, we propose MGTS-Net, a Multimodal Graph-enhanced Network for Time Series forecasting. The model consists of three core components: (1) a Multimodal Feature Extraction layer (MFE), which optimizes feature encoders according to the characteristics of temporal, visual, and textual modalities to extract temporal features of fine-grained patterns; (2) a Multimodal Feature Fusion layer (MFF), which constructs a heterogeneous graph to model intra-modal temporal dependencies and cross-modal alignment relationships and dynamically aggregates multimodal knowledge; (3) a Multi-Scale Prediction layer (MSP), which adapts to multi-scale features by dynamically weighting and fusing the outputs of short-term, medium-term, and long-term predictors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MGTS-Net exhibits excellent performance with light weight and high efficiency. Compared with other state-of-the-art baseline models, our method achieves superior performance, validating the superiority of the proposed methodology.