📄
Abstract - Time Series Foundation Models as Strong Baselines in Transportation Forecasting: A Large-Scale Benchmark Analysis
Accurate forecasting of transportation dynamics is essential for urban mobility and infrastructure planning. Although recent work has achieved strong performance with deep learning models, these methods typically require dataset-specific training, architecture design and hyper-parameter tuning. This paper evaluates whether general-purpose time-series foundation models can serve as forecasters for transportation tasks by benchmarking the zero-shot performance of the state-of-the-art model, Chronos-2, across ten real-world datasets covering highway traffic volume and flow, urban traffic speed, bike-sharing demand, and electric vehicle charging station data. Under a consistent evaluation protocol, we find that, even without any task-specific fine-tuning, Chronos-2 delivers state-of-the-art or competitive accuracy across most datasets, frequently outperforming classical statistical baselines and specialized deep learning architectures, particularly at longer horizons. Beyond point forecasting, we evaluate its native probabilistic outputs using prediction-interval coverage and sharpness, demonstrating that Chronos-2 also provides useful uncertainty quantification without dataset-specific training. In general, this study supports the adoption of time-series foundation models as a key baseline for transportation forecasting research.
时间序列基础模型作为交通预测的强大基线:一项大规模基准分析 /
Time Series Foundation Models as Strong Baselines in Transportation Forecasting: A Large-Scale Benchmark Analysis
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文通过大规模基准测试发现,通用时间序列基础模型Chronos-2在未经任何任务特定训练的情况下,就能在多种交通预测任务中达到顶尖或极具竞争力的精度,并能提供有效的不确定性量化,因此可作为交通预测研究的关键基线方法。