A Novel Dual-Path Interactive Attention Network for Multivariate Carbon Price Time Series Forecasting

Accurate carbon price forecasting is critical for trading decisions, risk management and policy formulation in carbon markets. However, mainstream decomposition-ensemble models suffer from two key drawbacks: point-wise modeling fails to capture long-term temporal dependencies, while independent modeling of decomposed trend and seasonal components leads to serious information loss. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel Dual-Path Interactive Attention Network (DPIANet) for carbon price time series forecasting, whose dual-parallel architecture consists of a Dual Interaction Attention (DIA) Block and a Decomposition–Subsequence Interaction Attention (DSIA) Block. First, DPIANet employs a patch-wise partitioning strategy to extract local temporal semantic information inaccessible to traditional point-wise segmentation. The DIA Block jointly captures temporal dependencies between different patches within the same sequence and inter-feature dependencies within the same time step. In parallel, the DSIA Block extracts interactive features between decomposed trend and seasonal subsequences, fusing these features with original subsequences to enhance representation and mitigate decomposition-induced information loss. A dual-layer feature selection method (PMI and XGBoost-SHAP) is adopted to identify key driving factors. Experiments on four representative Chinese regional carbon trading markets covering 2014-2020 show that DPIANet achieves superior prediction performance over state-of-the-art models in terms of MSE and MAE, with competitive robustness across different market characteristics, providing practical decision support for carbon market stakeholders.