My field is primarily audio/vision ML so I don't have any particular domain expertise, but I don't get how you can lump all "time-series" together in one big bucket. My naive understanding is that the way to improve the accuracy is to gain as much joint information as possible. Like:
> Known-future covariates. Some drivers of sensor behaviour are known in advance, such as production schedules, planned shutdowns, weather forecasts. Timestral can condition on them to improve forecast quality, so a scheduled load increase is expected rather than flagged as a surprise.
To me this should be the entire basis of the system, not a condition to improve forecast quality? Like if you're modelling electricity consumption, if all you have is a window of N previous samples, you're going to get completely beaten by a comparatively simple system that knows the time of day, that there's holidays coming up, the weather forecast, etc.
I would also think that these time-series forecasting models would gain from a sophisticated understanding at least the labels of the covariates? A 5M model has no idea what a "bank holiday" is, it just sees an arbitrary class go from 0 to 1, and won't have any useful inductive biases as to what it means or how to link them to other pieces of information.
E.g., wouldn't you predict €/MWh of electricity far more accurately with access to price of natural gas (itself influenced by many geopolitical factors), breakdown in composition of production of each energy source, predictions about roll-out (requiring a sophisticated LLM capable of understanding news and their implications), etc. What's the use in trying to predict it from 2 variables and a narrow window looking back at just 8192 or 32768 samples?
Or perhaps I misunderstand the use-case and this is more for extremely short term movements?
For some kinds of forecasting it doesn't need to be exactly accurate - eg say you are forecasting traffic for how to scale a load balancer, it can be a bit off it will just cost you a little and you can adjust after - a lot of feedback systems dont need full accuracy. You wouldnt use this to forecast whether to buy shares. It basically replaces various traditional curve fitting tools. If you need a really good forecast yes you are going to build a domain model. At least this is my understanding...
You're right but, if the time series looks like music then you can apply your music domain knowledge. You don't have to only apply knowledge that's general across every domain, part of the magic of large neural nets is that you can do recognition and prediction at the same time thereby using (statistically) things known from training about how to identify a sequence and then also how to continue it.
Sure adding outside info helps even more, but with enough data it should become unnecessary (or so goes the theory).
But why would you throw away that data at all? These are tiny models compared to domain-specific audio/music/image models, and any capacity spent on recognition is capacity that could have been used for prediction.
Is there a reason you don't throw in something like cross-attention on an embedding of the sequence description/data labels? I've trained numerous generative models for audio and images and it's always the case that the unconditional model performs worse, trains slower, etc. than the conditional one (with the best performance from a hybrid using classifier-free guidance or similar scheme).
Again I don't have experience with the domain of time-series forecasting directly, but I would think there are generalities between autoregressive generative models and time-series forecasting, given that both involve predicting the next sample(s) given N regularly sampled past inputs.
I interviewed for a company which used time series modelling to predict engine failure on ships. Though they didn't call it that, they called it just "AI" and weren't familiar with the time series literature at all. (Neither was I, but I did at least know that the time series literature was a thing.)
They just used a bunch of sensors attached to the engine.
That seems like a scenario where there wouldn't be external sources of information capable of improving your predictions. It also seemed to me like a scenario where good old fashioned statistical methods would outperform LSTMs, which was what they used.
(I didn't get the job - I was offered it, but they rescinded their offer at the last moment, supposedly because their investors had insisted they should hire a web developer instead.)
I appreciate this analysis, but I wonder, setting aside unpredictable current events for the moment, aren’t seasonal and scheduled events also covariates? eg forecasting baseball scores year round?
Any 'vibe check' on these; I don't have benchmarks but I tried out Le Chonk for general coding work that they claim it works really well at and I was very disappointed, it seemed to make all kinds of obvious errors of the kind that I haven't seen from opus, sol, deepseek flash etc in over a year
I've been using Mistral Large 4 and some of my other friends have as well.
Something is going on with the performance (as in speed of the service, not quality). Some days it's quite fast, some days it's so slow I interrupt it because I thought it was hanging.
I think they're shifting hosting capacity around, or otherwise messing with the model. Note that it's still a "preview" version, meaning they're still training it further for the final release and they are likely still figuring out the optimal hosting configuration as well.
It wouldn't surprise me to see further changes in both quality of the model and speed before the final release.
A lot of misconception around the utility of foundational time series models on HN.
Sure, you could train a XGboost model on a time series with holiday or event covariates, but what if you have 10k different series to forecast for?
You could train 10k different models, one for each series, but then they have very little history to learn from. Alternatively, you could train a single generic model to cover all 10k, but then you have to deal with scale mismatch between series in addition to the feature dev overhead between series. A TSFM saves a ton of work in modeling each of these series and could potentially generalize better to produce more accurate forecasts.
What's the input like? Does it incorporate language understanding, so that each time series has a natural language explanation of the series and all the data fields? If it takes in really descriptive text like that I can see the opportunity for generalization. If it's just a time series of non-descript numbers I see much much less opportunity for cross-series learning.
Very nice. It’s mind-blowing to me that it used to take me months to build and deploy a forecasting model five years ago. Now in minutes I can use something like this, implemented with help from an LLM, and get apparently quite good results (and fine-tune on my data, it seems).
Speed looks nice too. I want an open weight model with this performance now.
Meh....time series data is fundamentally different from textual data. I see why a time series "foundation model" seems appealing, especially to the marketing folks at Mistral. Real-world usability is very limited, which is probably the reason why the blog post features an imaginary customer rather than an actual reference.
Time based data is extremely important, and there are tons of techniques out there to train super fast super small models, but they are a pain in the ass to tune. I could see a foundation model that is kind of good at a lot of things, that could be fine tuned or used when you want something more straight forward to use to analyze a bunch of data.
Honestly this might be very good for feature selection to refine a much more specialized model.
Cofounder of The Forecasting Company here - disagree on this. The models now work quite well and are in prod at a number of places, including very sophisticated places - quant funds, top retail cos etc
You are telling me quant funds prefer a heavy-weight and slow ANN to a fast, specialized model? Maybe in totally non-critical environments, otherwise it's simply too slow, regardless of performance.
My field is primarily audio/vision ML so I don't have any particular domain expertise, but I don't get how you can lump all "time-series" together in one big bucket. My naive understanding is that the way to improve the accuracy is to gain as much joint information as possible. Like:
> Known-future covariates. Some drivers of sensor behaviour are known in advance, such as production schedules, planned shutdowns, weather forecasts. Timestral can condition on them to improve forecast quality, so a scheduled load increase is expected rather than flagged as a surprise.
To me this should be the entire basis of the system, not a condition to improve forecast quality? Like if you're modelling electricity consumption, if all you have is a window of N previous samples, you're going to get completely beaten by a comparatively simple system that knows the time of day, that there's holidays coming up, the weather forecast, etc.
I would also think that these time-series forecasting models would gain from a sophisticated understanding at least the labels of the covariates? A 5M model has no idea what a "bank holiday" is, it just sees an arbitrary class go from 0 to 1, and won't have any useful inductive biases as to what it means or how to link them to other pieces of information.
E.g., wouldn't you predict €/MWh of electricity far more accurately with access to price of natural gas (itself influenced by many geopolitical factors), breakdown in composition of production of each energy source, predictions about roll-out (requiring a sophisticated LLM capable of understanding news and their implications), etc. What's the use in trying to predict it from 2 variables and a narrow window looking back at just 8192 or 32768 samples?
Or perhaps I misunderstand the use-case and this is more for extremely short term movements?
For some kinds of forecasting it doesn't need to be exactly accurate - eg say you are forecasting traffic for how to scale a load balancer, it can be a bit off it will just cost you a little and you can adjust after - a lot of feedback systems dont need full accuracy. You wouldnt use this to forecast whether to buy shares. It basically replaces various traditional curve fitting tools. If you need a really good forecast yes you are going to build a domain model. At least this is my understanding...
Forecaster of the Confounding Company here :)
You're right but, if the time series looks like music then you can apply your music domain knowledge. You don't have to only apply knowledge that's general across every domain, part of the magic of large neural nets is that you can do recognition and prediction at the same time thereby using (statistically) things known from training about how to identify a sequence and then also how to continue it.
Sure adding outside info helps even more, but with enough data it should become unnecessary (or so goes the theory).
But why would you throw away that data at all? These are tiny models compared to domain-specific audio/music/image models, and any capacity spent on recognition is capacity that could have been used for prediction.
Is there a reason you don't throw in something like cross-attention on an embedding of the sequence description/data labels? I've trained numerous generative models for audio and images and it's always the case that the unconditional model performs worse, trains slower, etc. than the conditional one (with the best performance from a hybrid using classifier-free guidance or similar scheme).
Again I don't have experience with the domain of time-series forecasting directly, but I would think there are generalities between autoregressive generative models and time-series forecasting, given that both involve predicting the next sample(s) given N regularly sampled past inputs.
I interviewed for a company which used time series modelling to predict engine failure on ships. Though they didn't call it that, they called it just "AI" and weren't familiar with the time series literature at all. (Neither was I, but I did at least know that the time series literature was a thing.) They just used a bunch of sensors attached to the engine.
That seems like a scenario where there wouldn't be external sources of information capable of improving your predictions. It also seemed to me like a scenario where good old fashioned statistical methods would outperform LSTMs, which was what they used.
(I didn't get the job - I was offered it, but they rescinded their offer at the last moment, supposedly because their investors had insisted they should hire a web developer instead.)
I appreciate this analysis, but I wonder, setting aside unpredictable current events for the moment, aren’t seasonal and scheduled events also covariates? eg forecasting baseball scores year round?
It's quite impressive that they get performance so close to the leader t0-gamma but unfortunate about the restrictive license
Any 'vibe check' on these; I don't have benchmarks but I tried out Le Chonk for general coding work that they claim it works really well at and I was very disappointed, it seemed to make all kinds of obvious errors of the kind that I haven't seen from opus, sol, deepseek flash etc in over a year
Just tested Mistral 4 too in Vibe and it's slow. It works well, but is way too slow. Switched back to Mistral's GLM5.3, which is awesome.
Edit : working with GLM5.3 now, it's also slow. Maybe Mistral's under heavy load.
Disclaimer : Not Cofounder of The Forecasting Company here
I've been using Mistral Large 4 and some of my other friends have as well.
Something is going on with the performance (as in speed of the service, not quality). Some days it's quite fast, some days it's so slow I interrupt it because I thought it was hanging.
I think they're shifting hosting capacity around, or otherwise messing with the model. Note that it's still a "preview" version, meaning they're still training it further for the final release and they are likely still figuring out the optimal hosting configuration as well.
It wouldn't surprise me to see further changes in both quality of the model and speed before the final release.
How are you accessing Mistral 4 from Vibe? The only ones available on my end are Medium 3.5 and GLM-5.3 despite having a Pro subscription.
Focounder of the timecasting company here - this is some great european sovereignty right there!
A lot of misconception around the utility of foundational time series models on HN.
Sure, you could train a XGboost model on a time series with holiday or event covariates, but what if you have 10k different series to forecast for? You could train 10k different models, one for each series, but then they have very little history to learn from. Alternatively, you could train a single generic model to cover all 10k, but then you have to deal with scale mismatch between series in addition to the feature dev overhead between series. A TSFM saves a ton of work in modeling each of these series and could potentially generalize better to produce more accurate forecasts.
What's the input like? Does it incorporate language understanding, so that each time series has a natural language explanation of the series and all the data fields? If it takes in really descriptive text like that I can see the opportunity for generalization. If it's just a time series of non-descript numbers I see much much less opportunity for cross-series learning.
Very nice. It’s mind-blowing to me that it used to take me months to build and deploy a forecasting model five years ago. Now in minutes I can use something like this, implemented with help from an LLM, and get apparently quite good results (and fine-tune on my data, it seems).
Speed looks nice too. I want an open weight model with this performance now.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but you should be able to download the models at https://huggingface.co/collections/mistralai/timestral
crazy how they make an improvement of 0.03 look like a 5x difference
0.03 in what units?
How does it compare to nixtla TimeGPT?
https://github.com/Nixtla/nixtla
Timestral is free and open weights.
No need to pay for proprietary TimeGPT.
Timestral is not free - it has a "Modified" MIT, which requires you to buy from Mistral if your global business makes more than $20m a month.
Calling it "Modified" MIT is just misleading.
Meh....time series data is fundamentally different from textual data. I see why a time series "foundation model" seems appealing, especially to the marketing folks at Mistral. Real-world usability is very limited, which is probably the reason why the blog post features an imaginary customer rather than an actual reference.
Time based data is extremely important, and there are tons of techniques out there to train super fast super small models, but they are a pain in the ass to tune. I could see a foundation model that is kind of good at a lot of things, that could be fine tuned or used when you want something more straight forward to use to analyze a bunch of data.
Honestly this might be very good for feature selection to refine a much more specialized model.
Cofounder of The Forecasting Company here - disagree on this. The models now work quite well and are in prod at a number of places, including very sophisticated places - quant funds, top retail cos etc
You are telling me quant funds prefer a heavy-weight and slow ANN to a fast, specialized model? Maybe in totally non-critical environments, otherwise it's simply too slow, regardless of performance.
Not all of their trading is high freq
Do those places also include companies focused on private markets?
Not that I know of!
Agered. These are essentially numerology models.
Mistral is an embarrassment and clear proof that Europe needs to review its mechanisms for growing and retaining tech talent.
With such strong human capital, both in quantity and quality, Europe should in theory be competitive with US and China in AI.
Which US or Chinese time-series foundation models do you prefer over Mistral's?
Care to explain why Mistral is an embarrassment?