Residual TPP: A Unified Lightweight Approach for Event Stream Data Analysis

This work introduces Residual TPP, a novel, unified, and lightweight approach for analyzing event stream data. It leverages the strengths of both simple statistical TPPs and expressive neural TPPs to achieve superior performance. Specifically, we propose the Residual Events Decomposition (RED) technique in temporal point processes, which defines a weight function to quantify how well the intensity function captures the event characteristics. The RED serves as a flexible, plugand-play module that can be integrated with any TPP model in a wide range of tasks. It enables the identification of events for which the intensity function provides a poor fit, referred to as residual events. By combining RED with a Hawkes process, we capture the self-exciting nature of the data and identify residual events. Then an arbitrary neural TPP is employed to take care of residual events. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Residual TPP consistently achieves state-of-the-art goodness-of-fit and prediction performance in multiple domains and offers significant computational advantages as well.