arXiv:2503. 24007v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In time series forecasting, covariates represent external factors that influence target variables.
By Yosuke Yamaguchi, Issei Suemitsu, Wenpeng Wei
The paper introduces SimpleTimeBench, a diagnostic suite testing basic temporal primitives like monotonic trends, periodic signals, and leading indicator covariates. It finds that prominent multivariate Time Series Foundation Models (Chronos‑2, Moirai, and Toto) often produce suboptimal zero‑shot forecasts for these simple patterns, and that fine‑tuning can improve specific tasks while harming performance on other fundamentals. These failures persist in real‑world sensor forecasting, indicating that current TSFMs may lack the inductive biases needed to capture straightforward relationships, thereby limiting their practical reliability.
By Nafiseh Ghoroghchian, Haipeng Zhang, Shuyi Han, Alex Labach, George Stein
WhatIf-Bench is a semi‑synthetic benchmark that tests how well time‑series forecasters use covariates to predict a target’s response to future events. It generates 37,665 tasks from mechanistic simulators of data centers, power grids, road traffic, and water networks, varying covariate numbers, historical events, and event length. Evaluation shows large‑language models outperform the best time‑series foundation models, with all models performing well on replayed events but struggling on novel covariate settings, highlighting generalization as the main challenge.
By Arjun Ashok, Mihir Parmar, Palash Goyal, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Chun-Liang Li, Irina Rish, Alexandre Drouin, Jinsung Yoon, Tomas Pfister
The study benchmarks various forecasting models—including statistical, machine‑learning, recurrent neural networks, and pretrained TimesFM—for day‑ahead electricity demand in a university building. TimesFM 3.0 with weather covariates achieves the lowest overall mean absolute error, outperforming a weekly seasonal‑naive baseline by about 43%, while XGBoost remains competitive and requires only local fitting. The LSTM model takes longer to train without improving accuracy, and TimesFM’s performance is robust even without covariates, though covariates slightly improve holiday forecasts.
By Amey Vasulkar, Samuel Kernan Freire, Arie-Willem de Leeuw, Tadeo-Baldiri Salcedo-Rahola
arXiv:2609.24559v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present $t_0$, a family of open-weights foundation models for forecasting with multivariate context. We release its first two members: $\texttt{t0-a...
By Lucas Meyer, Claudio Sole, Huikan Xiang, Nicolas Li, Lucas Franceschino, Arnau Quera-Bofarull, Maarten P. Scholl, Joachim Fainberg, Geoffrey N\'egiar
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...
By Daniel Schoess, Florian von Wangenheim