Paper ID: 2401.08552

Explaining Time Series via Contrastive and Locally Sparse Perturbations

Zichuan Liu, Yingying Zhang, Tianchun Wang, Zefan Wang, Dongsheng Luo, Mengnan Du, Min Wu, Yi Wang, Chunlin Chen, Lunting Fan, Qingsong Wen

Explaining multivariate time series is a compound challenge, as it requires identifying important locations in the time series and matching complex temporal patterns. Although previous saliency-based methods addressed the challenges, their perturbation may not alleviate the distribution shift issue, which is inevitable especially in heterogeneous samples. We present ContraLSP, a locally sparse model that introduces counterfactual samples to build uninformative perturbations but keeps distribution using contrastive learning. Furthermore, we incorporate sample-specific sparse gates to generate more binary-skewed and smooth masks, which easily integrate temporal trends and select the salient features parsimoniously. Empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that ContraLSP outperforms state-of-the-art models, demonstrating a substantial improvement in explanation quality for time series data. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zichuan-liu/ContraLSP}.

Submitted: Jan 16, 2024