Comparative Analysis of Time Series Foundation Models for Demographic Forecasting: Enhancing Predictive Accuracy in US Population Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of time series foundation models, specifically TimesFM, in improving demographic forecasting accuracy for US population data, outperforming traditional models across diverse states and populations.

Contribution

It introduces and assesses a novel Time Series Foundation Model (TimesFM) for demographic forecasting, demonstrating superior performance over traditional methods without extensive fine-tuning.

Findings

TimesFM achieves lowest MSE in 86.67% of test cases.

Strong performance on minority populations with sparse data.

Foundation models can enhance demographic predictions without task-specific tuning.

Abstract

Demographic shifts, influenced by globalization, economic conditions, geopolitical events, and environmental factors, pose significant challenges for policymakers and researchers. Accurate demographic forecasting is essential for informed decision-making in areas such as urban planning, healthcare, and economic policy. This study explores the application of time series foundation models to predict demographic changes in the United States using datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). We evaluate the performance of the Time Series Foundation Model (TimesFM) against traditional baselines including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), and Linear Regression. Our experiments across six demographically diverse states demonstrate that TimesFM achieves the lowest Mean Squared Error (MSE) in 86.67% of test cases, with particularly strong performance on minority populations with sparse historical data. These findings highlight the potential of pre-trained foundation models to enhance demographic analysis and inform proactive policy interventions without requiring extensive task-specific fine-tuning.