The paper demonstrates that the outcome of a forecasting leaderboard is largely determined by the evaluator’s design choices rather than the models themselves. By fixing the data, horizon, and period, the authors varied three key evaluation decisions—unit of analysis, error pooling, and scoring metric—and showed that each can reverse or eliminate the apparent superiority of any forecasting method. The study also evaluates the practical impact of these choices on a deployed system, revealing that the selection rule captures a significant portion of the potential performance gain, and confirms the findings on an external public dataset.
By Md Rezwanul Islam, Wael Mohammed
arXiv:2609.24862v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agentic time series forecasting concerns systems whose underlying mechanisms evolve, making the relative effectiveness of numerical models, reasoning s...
By Yifan Hu, Xilin Dai, Zhiyuan Qu, Yiding Liu, Zewei Dong, Jiang-ming Yang, Qiang Xu
arXiv:2607. 10972v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many evaluations of model outputs rely either on contracts checkable at evaluation time or on feedback that arrives within the operating loop.
By Aleh Manchuliantsau
Agentic time series forecasting concerns systems whose underlying mechanisms evolve, making the relative effectiveness of numerical models, reasoning strategies, and intervention rules inherently time...
arXiv:2607. 11653v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Black-box conditional quantile forecasts are widely used for sequential decisions under asymmetric costs, such as inventory planning in supply chain management.
By Ivane Antonov, Sohom Mukherjee, Richard Pibernik, Yo Joong Choe
The paper argues that traditional weather forecast evaluations, which focus on statistical comparisons between forecasts and observations, do not adequately capture how forecasts influence real-world decisions. It introduces decision calibration, a framework that assesses probabilistic forecast performance from the decision-maker’s perspective. Using this framework, the authors compare a machine learning model to a classical numerical weather prediction model across various weather-dependent decision tasks, finding that forecast-level performance does not reliably predict decision-level outcomes and that model rankings can shift depending on the decision context.
By Kornelius Raeth, Nicole Ludwig