The Tabular Foundation Model TabPFN Outperforms Specialized Time Series Forecasting Models Based on Simple Features

Abstract

Foundation models have become popular in forecasting due to their ability to make accurate predictions, even with minimal fine-tuning on specific datasets. In this paper, we demonstrate how the newly released regression variant of TabPFN, a general tabular foundation model, can be applied to time series forecasting. We propose a straightforward approach, TabPFN-TS, which pairs TabPFN with simple feature engineering to achieve strong forecasting performance. Despite its simplicity and with only 11M parameters, TabPFN-TS outperforms Chronos-Mini, a model of similar size, and matches or even slightly outperforms Chronos-Large, which has 65-fold more parameters. A key strength of our method lies in its reliance solely on artificial data during pre-training, avoiding the need for large training datasets and eliminating the risk of benchmark contamination.