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Main Authors: Chang, Ching, Shi, Yidan, Cao, Defu, Yang, Wei, Hwang, Jeehyun, Wang, Haixin, Pang, Jiacheng, Wang, Wei, Liu, Yan, Peng, Wen-Chih, Chen, Tien-Fu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11575
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author Chang, Ching
Shi, Yidan
Cao, Defu
Yang, Wei
Hwang, Jeehyun
Wang, Haixin
Pang, Jiacheng
Wang, Wei
Liu, Yan
Peng, Wen-Chih
Chen, Tien-Fu
author_facet Chang, Ching
Shi, Yidan
Cao, Defu
Yang, Wei
Hwang, Jeehyun
Wang, Haixin
Pang, Jiacheng
Wang, Wei
Liu, Yan
Peng, Wen-Chih
Chen, Tien-Fu
contents Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_11575
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models
Chang, Ching
Shi, Yidan
Cao, Defu
Yang, Wei
Hwang, Jeehyun
Wang, Haixin
Pang, Jiacheng
Wang, Wei
Liu, Yan
Peng, Wen-Chih
Chen, Tien-Fu
Artificial Intelligence
Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.
title A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11575