The AI Revolution in Time Series: Challenges and Opportunites

Recent advancements in deep learning and artificial intelligence have driven significant progress in time series modeling and analysis. On one hand, researchers seek breakthroughs in performance on classical tasks such as forecasting, anomaly detection, classification, etc. On the other hand, it is intriguing to explore the potential for answering more complex inference and reasoning tasks from time series. In this keynote, I will examine the pathways toward foundation models for time series and discuss future research directions in this rapidly evolving field. The remarkable success of foundation models in natural language processing - exemplified by Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) - suggests their potential to revolutionize time series analysis. I will introduce our recent efforts along this direction, including TEMPO, a novel framework designed to learn effective time series representations by leveraging two key inductive biases: one is explicit decomposition of trend, seasonal, and residual components, and the second is prompt-based distribution adaptation for diverse time series types. Beyond representation learning, practical applications demands advanced reasoning capabilities with multi-step time series inference task, requiring both compositional reasoning and computational precision. To tackle this challenge, I will discuss TS-reasoner, a program-aided inference agent that integrates large language models (LLMs) with structured execution pipelines, in-context learning, and self-correction mechanisms. I will discuss a new benchmark dataset and evaluation framework to systematically assess multi-step time series reasoning. By bridging deep learning advances with structured reasoning, I will highlight the next frontier in time series research, i.e., developing foundation models that enhance forecasting performance, generative models, and reasoning capabilities from time series across diverse applications.