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arXiv:2608.20406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public health forecasts must respond to abrupt changes in surveillance data without over-extrapolating noise, reporting artifacts, or temporary trends....
The paper introduces Empirical Research Assistance (ERA), an autonomous system that employs Large Language Model‑guided tree search to create, evaluate, and refine executable forecasting software for infectious diseases. In a real‑time evaluation during the 2025‑26 U.S. respiratory season, ERA produced diverse models for influenza, COVID‑19, and RSV, and an ensemble of these models outperformed the CDC’s gold‑standard forecast ensembles across all three pathogens. ERA also demonstrated robustness in data‑scarce RSV scenarios and showed that higher‑tier language models and specific optimization metrics can improve forecast accuracy.
We investigate whether the past of an auxiliary time series provides predictive information about a target beyond that contained in the target's own history. We compare matched out-of-sample target-on...
arXiv:2609. 20193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval plug-ins supply a deep forecaster with information its lookback window cannot carry.
The paper introduces paired, mechanism‑controlled stress tests that decompose changes in expected squared error for time‑series forecasting into environmental risk and forecast‑oracle distance. Using an origin‑conditioned predictive oracle, the authors validate three end‑to‑end controls and apply the benchmark to 24 forecasters, revealing that many models exhibit higher realized MSE yet lower oracle distance under frequent switching, and that environmental risk dominates in most scenarios. The study also demonstrates that visually compelling discovery profiles often fail to replicate on independent data‑generating process realizations, underscoring the importance of component‑wise diagnosis and held‑out stability audits.
arXiv:2608. 14903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantitative forecasts of frontier artificial intelligence often connect dated targets to trends in benchmark scores, training compute, release time, or expert belief.