Time-series forecasting research has been moving steadily toward larger architectures, from specialized transformers to general-purpose foundation models, on the assumption that capacity is what unlocks accuracy. We take the opposite position: most of the gap can be closed at far lower cost by tuning preprocessing rather than scaling models.
arXiv:2606. 27282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series forecasting research has been moving steadily toward larger architectures, from specialized transformers to general-purpose foundation models, on the assumption that capacity is what unlocks accuracy.
The paper presents an empirical benchmark of nine modern deep‑learning models for time‑series forecasting of smart‑meter energy consumption, evaluated on two publicly available datasets. It examines how historical input length, prediction horizon, and model architecture affect accuracy, finding that longer historical context improves performance up to a saturation point and that accuracy declines with longer horizons. The study also compares computational complexity, showing that lightweight architectures achieve similar performance to heavier models, and notes that model choice has limited impact across most demographic and household subgroups.
arXiv:2603. 15506v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We argue that the current practice of evaluating AI/ML time-series forecasting models, predominantly on benchmarks characterized by strong, persistent periodicities and seasonalities, obscures real progress by overlooking the performance of efficient classical methods.
The paper presents an empirical benchmark of nine deep learning models for smart meter energy forecasting, evaluating them on two public datasets. It examines how historical input length, prediction horizon, and model architecture affect accuracy, finding that longer historical context improves performance up to a saturation point while accuracy declines with longer horizons. The study also compares computational cost, showing lightweight models achieve similar accuracy to heavier ones, and notes that model choice matters less across most population segments.
arXiv:2602. 02288v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current time-series forecasting models are primarily based on transformer-style neural networks.
arXiv:2606. 28670v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce MACROCAST, a lightweight Time Series Foundation Model (TSFM) for real-time macroeconomic forecasting.
arXiv:2510. 04487v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While accuracy is a critical requirement for time series forecasting, an equally important desideratum is reasonable forecast volatility across forecast creation dates (FCDs).
arXiv:2602. 17634v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning time series foundation models has been shown to be a promising approach for zero-shot time series forecasting across diverse time series domains.
arXiv:2606. 09954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large models for time-series forecasting have been emerged as a promising paradigm for training models on heterogeneous collections of signals.
arXiv:2505. 15354v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-series forecasting is a critical task in various business domains, but it remains inherently challenging.
arXiv:2609.39386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are evaluated as forecasters of future values, yet for sparse series many decisions depend only on whi...
arXiv:2608. 14106v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When forecasting hourly returns for 1,000 US equities, we observe an unexpected phenomenon: predictions become nearly flat and show poor stock ranking, as measured by cross-sectional correlation.