Google's 200M-parameter time-series foundation model with 16k context

I somehow find the concept of a general time series model strange. How can the same model predict egg prices in Italy, and global inflation in a reliable way?

And how would you even use this model, given that there are no explanations that help you trust where the prediction comes from…

It would be nice to add (2024) to the title, this is not news (see: https://research.google/blog/a-decoder-only-foundation-model...)

Here is the link to the blogpost, that actually describe what this is: https://github.com/google-research/timesfm?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Can someone explain ELI5 how it does work? and how many data points it can read?

Also: https://github.com/Nixtla/nixtla and https://facebook.github.io/prophet/

So the time series are provided with no context? It's just trained on lots of sets of numbers? Then you give it a new set of numbers and it guesses the rest, again with no context?

My guess as to how this would work: the machine will first guess from the data alone if this is one of the categories it has already seen/inferred (share prices, google trend cat searches etc.) Then it'll output a plausible completion for the category.

That doesn't seem as if it will work well for any categories outside the training data. I would rather just use either a simple model (ARIMA or whatever) or a theoretically-informed model. But what do I know.

I'm willing to bet an intelligent LLM with a dataset and a pandas stats package could outperform this model by running its own experiments and making predictions

This has been around a few months now, has anyone built anything on it?

Let's say I have long time series of past solar irradiation and long time series of past weather forecasts. Can this model make use of weather forecasts for time X in the future to predict electricity prices in the future?

That is, can it use one time series at time X to predict another time series at time X?

Or is this strictly about finding patterns WITHIN a time series.

Somehow I missed that one. Are there any competition on this?

I always had difficulties with ML and time series, I'll need to try that out.

isn't this basically prophet?

Has anyone gotten this to run on MLX yet?

Can this finally break the stock markets?

This has been around a few months now, has anyone built anything on it?

(2024)

Let me be blunt: Shannon would tell us that time forecasting is bullshit:

There is infinitely more entropy in the real world out there than any model can even remotely capture.

The world is not minecraft.

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