TimesFM-3: A zero-shot foundation model for multivariate forecasting
Since the debut of TimesFM in 2024, we’ve seen the adoption of time-series foundation models for real-world time-series forecasting tasks across multiple domains, such as retail, finance, observability, manufacturing, healthcare and natural sciences.
Up until TimesFM-2.5 (released in September 2025), our models were strictly limited to univariate forecasting: forecasting using only the history of a single time series. Yet, most real-world forecasting problems are inherently multivariate: where multiple time series and auxiliary external features jointly impact the future forecast of a time series. Consider forecasting ice cream sales for a retail chain. Past sales alone rarely tell the full story. A good forecast should also draw on sales of related products (e.g., ice cream cones, syrups), historical foot traffic, and known future events like weather forecasts, promotions, and holidays.
Today we introduce TimesFM-3, the next generation of our time-series foundation model that is natively pre-trained for multivariate forecasting. TimesFM-3 has 330 million parameters and is pre-trained on a real-world and synthetic time-series corpus comprising more than 1 trillion time points. Building on the efficiency and zero-shot generalization of its predecessors, TimesFM-3 adds robust support for complex multivariate scenarios in a zero-shot manner. It can jointly predict multiple coevolving time series, capturing dependencies that improve overall accuracy without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. The model natively supports:
- Multiple targets: Forecast multiple related time series simultaneously (e.g., jointly forecasting different brands of ice cream). The model supports both point and quantile forecasts for all targets.
- Past covariates: Incorporate features that are only known historically (e.g., past foot traffic).
- Past-future (dynamic) covariates: Leverage known future events to guide the forecast (e.g., planned promotional campaigns or weather forecasts).
