The paper introduces fable.intermittent, an R package that consolidates various probabilistic forecasting methods for intermittent time series within the fable framework, enabling streamlined fitting and evaluation across multiple datasets. It also presents TWEES, a new exponential smoothing model using a Tweedie predictive distribution, and releases tweedieDistr, a faster implementation of the Tweedie distribution. The authors evaluate these tools on four datasets provided with the package.
arXiv:2601. 14031v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forecasting intermittent time series, which contain zeros, is a crucial challenge in supply chains as inventory policies require probabilistic forecasts to establish safety levels.
arXiv:2609.14718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Demand forecasting is critical in modern industry, offering opportunities to reduce costs and gain competitive advantage through improved inventory man...
arXiv:2607. 13331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retail demand forecasts are reused across replenishment, capacity, labor, and transportation planning cycles.
Existing research on irregular time-series forecasting has primarily focused on model design, while evaluation metrics remain insufficiently studied. Existing benchmarks typically use mean squared error (MSE) as the evaluation metric.
The paper critiques the prevalent use of mean squared error (MSE) for evaluating irregular time‑series forecasting, arguing that MSE is biased by timestamp sampling distributions. It introduces the Continuous‑time Squared Error (CSE), an importance‑weighted metric that theoretically offers a tighter asymptotic bound on continuous‑time risk than MSE. A comprehensive benchmark across synthetic, semi‑synthetic, and eight real‑world datasets demonstrates that CSE more accurately recovers continuous‑time risk, revealing limitations of relying solely on MSE.
Large-scale retail and industrial forecasting systems contain many heterogeneous time series whose lifecycle, sparsity, volatility, seasonality, spectral patterns, and contextual sensitivity differ substantially. A single forecasting model rarely performs well across all regimes, while dense ensembles increase inference cost and provide limited insight into expert suitability.
arXiv:2606. 27438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Since its initial release in 2020, Darts has become a widely used open-source Python library for time series analysis.
arXiv:2609.13840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A contract-logistics spare-parts operator is paid on order-level service: an order counts only if every requested line is fulfilled, yet forecasters ar...
arXiv:2608. 03259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As time-series foundation models have emerged, the need for benchmarks that can evaluate their forecasting ability in meaningful ways has become increasingly important.
arXiv:2606. 08896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale retail and industrial forecasting systems contain many heterogeneous time series whose lifecycle, sparsity, volatility, seasonality, spectral patterns, and contextual sensitivity differ substantially.
arXiv:2505. 15354v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-series forecasting is a critical task in various business domains, but it remains inherently challenging.
arXiv:2608. 14054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting with pretrained foundation models has demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities.