Comparative Analysis of Time Series Foundation Models for Demographic Forecasting: Enhancing Predictive Accuracy in US Population Dynamics
It addresses demographic forecasting for policymakers and researchers, but is incremental as it applies existing foundation models to a new domain.
This study tackled the problem of demographic forecasting in the US by applying time series foundation models, resulting in TimesFM achieving the lowest Mean Squared Error in 86.67% of test cases, especially for minority populations with sparse data.
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.