TimeSeriesScientist: A General-Purpose AI Agent for Time Series Analysis

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Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Haokun, Zhang, Xiang, Wei, Jiaqi, Xu, Yiwei, He, Yuting, Sun, Siqi, You, Chenyu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhao, Haokun
Zhang, Xiang
Wei, Jiaqi
Xu, Yiwei
He, Yuting
Sun, Siqi
You, Chenyu
author_facet Zhao, Haokun
Zhang, Xiang
Wei, Jiaqi
Xu, Yiwei
He, Yuting
Sun, Siqi
You, Chenyu
contents Time series forecasting is central to decision-making in domains as diverse as energy, finance, climate, and public health. In practice, forecasters face thousands of short, noisy series that vary in frequency, quality, and horizon, where the dominant cost lies not in model fitting, but in the labor-intensive preprocessing, validation, and ensembling required to obtain reliable predictions. Prevailing statistical and deep learning models are tailored to specific datasets or domains and generalize poorly. A general, domain-agnostic framework that minimizes human intervention is urgently in demand. In this paper, we introduce TimeSeriesScientist (TSci), the first LLM-driven agentic framework for general time series forecasting. The framework comprises four specialized agents: Curator performs LLM-guided diagnostics augmented by external tools that reason over data statistics to choose targeted preprocessing; Planner narrows the hypothesis space of model choice by leveraging multi-modal diagnostics and self-planning over the input; Forecaster performs model fitting and validation and, based on the results, adaptively selects the best model configuration as well as ensemble strategy to make final predictions; and Reporter synthesizes the whole process into a comprehensive, transparent report. With transparent natural-language rationales and comprehensive reports, TSci transforms the forecasting workflow into a white-box system that is both interpretable and extensible across tasks. Empirical results on eight established benchmarks demonstrate that TSci consistently outperforms both statistical and LLM-based baselines, reducing forecast error by an average of 10.4% and 38.2%, respectively. Moreover, TSci produces a clear and rigorous report that makes the forecasting workflow more transparent and interpretable.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01538
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TimeSeriesScientist: A General-Purpose AI Agent for Time Series Analysis
Zhao, Haokun
Zhang, Xiang
Wei, Jiaqi
Xu, Yiwei
He, Yuting
Sun, Siqi
You, Chenyu
Machine Learning
Time series forecasting is central to decision-making in domains as diverse as energy, finance, climate, and public health. In practice, forecasters face thousands of short, noisy series that vary in frequency, quality, and horizon, where the dominant cost lies not in model fitting, but in the labor-intensive preprocessing, validation, and ensembling required to obtain reliable predictions. Prevailing statistical and deep learning models are tailored to specific datasets or domains and generalize poorly. A general, domain-agnostic framework that minimizes human intervention is urgently in demand. In this paper, we introduce TimeSeriesScientist (TSci), the first LLM-driven agentic framework for general time series forecasting. The framework comprises four specialized agents: Curator performs LLM-guided diagnostics augmented by external tools that reason over data statistics to choose targeted preprocessing; Planner narrows the hypothesis space of model choice by leveraging multi-modal diagnostics and self-planning over the input; Forecaster performs model fitting and validation and, based on the results, adaptively selects the best model configuration as well as ensemble strategy to make final predictions; and Reporter synthesizes the whole process into a comprehensive, transparent report. With transparent natural-language rationales and comprehensive reports, TSci transforms the forecasting workflow into a white-box system that is both interpretable and extensible across tasks. Empirical results on eight established benchmarks demonstrate that TSci consistently outperforms both statistical and LLM-based baselines, reducing forecast error by an average of 10.4% and 38.2%, respectively. Moreover, TSci produces a clear and rigorous report that makes the forecasting workflow more transparent and interpretable.
title TimeSeriesScientist: A General-Purpose AI Agent for Time Series Analysis
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01538