When LLM Meets Time Series: Can LLMs Perform Multi-Step Time Series Reasoning and Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ye, Wen, Liu, Jinbo, Cao, Defu, Yang, Wei, Liu, Yan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Ye, Wen
Liu, Jinbo
Cao, Defu
Yang, Wei
Liu, Yan
author_facet Ye, Wen
Liu, Jinbo
Cao, Defu
Yang, Wei
Liu, Yan
contents The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked growing interest in their application to time series analysis tasks. However, their ability to perform complex reasoning over temporal data in real-world application domains remains underexplored. To move toward this goal, a first step is to establish a rigorous benchmark dataset for evaluation. In this work, we introduce the TSAIA Benchmark, a first attempt to evaluate LLMs as time-series AI assistants. To ensure both scientific rigor and practical relevance, we surveyed over 20 academic publications and identified 33 real-world task formulations. The benchmark encompasses a broad spectrum of challenges, ranging from constraint-aware forecasting to anomaly detection with threshold calibration: tasks that require compositional reasoning and multi-step time series analysis. The question generator is designed to be dynamic and extensible, supporting continuous expansion as new datasets or task types are introduced. Given the heterogeneous nature of the tasks, we adopt task-specific success criteria and tailored inference-quality metrics to ensure meaningful evaluation for each task. We apply this benchmark to assess eight state-of-the-art LLMs under a unified evaluation protocol. Our analysis reveals limitations in current models' ability to assemble complex time series analysis workflows, underscoring the need for specialized methodologies for domain-specific adaptation. Our benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Melady/TSAIA, and the code is available at https://github.com/USC-Melady/TSAIA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01822
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When LLM Meets Time Series: Can LLMs Perform Multi-Step Time Series Reasoning and Inference
Ye, Wen
Liu, Jinbo
Cao, Defu
Yang, Wei
Liu, Yan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked growing interest in their application to time series analysis tasks. However, their ability to perform complex reasoning over temporal data in real-world application domains remains underexplored. To move toward this goal, a first step is to establish a rigorous benchmark dataset for evaluation. In this work, we introduce the TSAIA Benchmark, a first attempt to evaluate LLMs as time-series AI assistants. To ensure both scientific rigor and practical relevance, we surveyed over 20 academic publications and identified 33 real-world task formulations. The benchmark encompasses a broad spectrum of challenges, ranging from constraint-aware forecasting to anomaly detection with threshold calibration: tasks that require compositional reasoning and multi-step time series analysis. The question generator is designed to be dynamic and extensible, supporting continuous expansion as new datasets or task types are introduced. Given the heterogeneous nature of the tasks, we adopt task-specific success criteria and tailored inference-quality metrics to ensure meaningful evaluation for each task. We apply this benchmark to assess eight state-of-the-art LLMs under a unified evaluation protocol. Our analysis reveals limitations in current models' ability to assemble complex time series analysis workflows, underscoring the need for specialized methodologies for domain-specific adaptation. Our benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Melady/TSAIA, and the code is available at https://github.com/USC-Melady/TSAIA.
title When LLM Meets Time Series: Can LLMs Perform Multi-Step Time Series Reasoning and Inference
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01822