CASE-Net: Deep Spatio-Temporal Representation Learning via Causal Attention and Channel Recalibration for Multivariate Time Series Classification

CASE-Net: Deep Spatio-Temporal Representation Learning via Causal Attention and Channel Recalibration for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Fan Zhang, Yating Cui, Hua Wang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3187-3195. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/354

Multivariate time series (MTS) classification is foundational to pervasive computing and financial analysis, yet existing multi-scale paradigms are often constrained by suboptimal representation fidelity. We identify two critical bottlenecks: temporal non-causality in standard encoders that induces temporal confounding in non-stationary dynamics, and the absence of explicit channel saliency mechanisms that allows noise to contaminate the latent space. To address these challenges, we propose the Causal Attention and Spatio-temporal Encoder Network (CASE-Net), an architecture designed for structural manifold pre-conditioning. CASE-Net synergizes a Causal Temporal Encoder, which enforces physical arrow-of-time constraints via masked self-attention and causal convolutions, with an Adaptive Channel Recalibration module functioning as an information bottleneck to suppress detrimental noise. Comprehensive evaluations across six heterogeneous domains demonstrate that CASE-Net establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks on four tasks, achieving a peak accuracy of 98.6% on the AWR dataset and superior robustness in non-stationary regimes.
Keywords:
Data Mining: Mining spatial and/or temporal data
Machine Learning: Deep learning architectures
Machine Learning: Time series and data streams