Pre-trained Forecasting Models: Strong Zero-Shot Feature Extractors for Time Series Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Auer, Andreas, Klotz, Daniel, Böck, Sebastinan, Hochreiter, Sepp
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Auer, Andreas
Klotz, Daniel
Böck, Sebastinan
Hochreiter, Sepp
author_facet Auer, Andreas
Klotz, Daniel
Böck, Sebastinan
Hochreiter, Sepp
contents Recent research on time series foundation models has primarily focused on forecasting, leaving it unclear how generalizable their learned representations are. In this study, we examine whether frozen pre-trained forecasting models can provide effective representations for classification. To this end, we compare different representation extraction strategies and introduce two model-agnostic embedding augmentations. Our experiments show that the best forecasting models achieve classification accuracy that matches or even surpasses that of state-of-the-art models pre-trained specifically for classification. Moreover, we observe a positive correlation between forecasting and classification performance. These findings challenge the assumption that task-specific pre-training is necessary, and suggest that learning to forecast may provide a powerful route toward constructing general-purpose time series foundation models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_26777
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pre-trained Forecasting Models: Strong Zero-Shot Feature Extractors for Time Series Classification
Auer, Andreas
Klotz, Daniel
Böck, Sebastinan
Hochreiter, Sepp
Machine Learning
Recent research on time series foundation models has primarily focused on forecasting, leaving it unclear how generalizable their learned representations are. In this study, we examine whether frozen pre-trained forecasting models can provide effective representations for classification. To this end, we compare different representation extraction strategies and introduce two model-agnostic embedding augmentations. Our experiments show that the best forecasting models achieve classification accuracy that matches or even surpasses that of state-of-the-art models pre-trained specifically for classification. Moreover, we observe a positive correlation between forecasting and classification performance. These findings challenge the assumption that task-specific pre-training is necessary, and suggest that learning to forecast may provide a powerful route toward constructing general-purpose time series foundation models.
title Pre-trained Forecasting Models: Strong Zero-Shot Feature Extractors for Time Series Classification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26777