Can Slow-thinking LLMs Reason Over Time? Empirical Studies in Time Series Forecasting

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether slow-thinking large language models can perform time series forecasting by reasoning over temporal data, revealing their potential and limitations in zero-shot scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces TimeReasoner, an empirical study framing TSF as a reasoning task and evaluates slow-thinking LLMs' zero-shot forecasting abilities.

Findings

LLMs show non-trivial zero-shot forecasting capabilities

They effectively capture high-level trends and contextual shifts

The study highlights both potential and limitations of LLMs in temporal reasoning

Abstract

Time series forecasting (TSF) is a fundamental and widely studied task, spanning methods from classical statistical approaches to modern deep learning and multimodal language modeling. Despite their effectiveness, these methods often follow a fast thinking paradigm emphasizing pattern extraction and direct value mapping, while overlooking explicit reasoning over temporal dynamics and contextual dependencies. Meanwhile, emerging slow-thinking LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT-o1, DeepSeek-R1) have demonstrated impressive multi-step reasoning capabilities across diverse domains, suggesting a new opportunity for reframing TSF as a structured reasoning task. This motivates a key question: can slow-thinking LLMs effectively reason over temporal patterns to support time series forecasting, even in zero-shot manner? To investigate this, in this paper, we propose TimeReasoner, an extensive empirical study that formulates TSF as a conditional reasoning task. We design a series of prompting strategies to elicit inference-time reasoning from pretrained slow-thinking LLMs and evaluate their performance across diverse TSF benchmarks. Our findings reveal that slow-thinking LLMs exhibit non-trivial zero-shot forecasting capabilities, especially in capturing high-level trends and contextual shifts. While preliminary, our study surfaces important insights into the reasoning behaviors of LLMs in temporal domains highlighting both their potential and limitations. We hope this work catalyzes further research into reasoning-based forecasting paradigms and paves the way toward more interpretable and generalizable TSF frameworks.