TimesFM

TimesFM (Time Series Foundation Model) is a pretrained time-series foundation model developed by Google Research for time-series forecasting.

• Paper: A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting, ICML 2024.
• 🆕 TimesFM 3.0 Checkpoint: google/timesfm-3.0-pytorch. Checkpoints up to 2.5: TimesFM Hugging Face Collection.
• Google Reseach blog posts:
  • TimesFM-3: A zero-shot foundation model for multivariate forecasting
  • A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting
• TimesFM in Google 1P Products:
  • BigQuery ML: Enterprise level SQL queries for scalability and reliability.
  • Google Sheets: For your daily spreadsheet.
  • Vertex Model Garden: Dockerized endpoint for agentic calling.

This open version is not an officially supported Google product.

Latest Model Version: TimesFM 3.0 ✨

Archived Model Versions:

• 2.5: relevant code under src/timesfm.
• 1.0 and 2.0: relevant code archived in the subdirectory v1. You can pip install timesfm==1.3.0 to install an older version of this package to load them.

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Update — September 2026

TimesFM 3.0 finishes rollout in Google Cloud BigQuery ML, supporting commercial and production uses (see clarified license notice).

Update — August 2026

TimesFM 3.0 is out!

TimesFM 3.0 introduces native multivariate time-series forecasting, flexible covariate support (both past-only and past-and-future covariates), superior zero-shot generalist capabilities, and top performance across all three major time-series foundation model benchmarks.

Key Highlights:

• Native Multivariate & Univariate Forecasting with Covariates: Seamlessly forecast multi-channel multivariate series as well as individual univariate series, with native support for past-only and past-and-future dynamic covariates without per-task tuning.
• Top Benchmark Performance:
  • 🥇 fev-bench: Rank #1 overall across 100 diverse real-world forecasting tasks.
  • 🥇 TIME Benchmark: Rank #1 overall across 50 domain datasets and 98 evaluation tasks.
  • 🥇 GIFT-Eval: Rank #1 among all foundation models.

License notice for pretrained weights

Important: The TimesFM source code in this repository is licensed under Apache-2.0, and model weights up to version 2.5 remain Apache-2.0. However, TimesFM 3.0 pretrained weights are distributed under the separate timesfm-non-commercial-license-v1.0 license and are restricted to non-commercial, non-production use. Commercial or production use of downloaded / self-hosted weights is not permitted.

Commercial & Production Use: Commercial and production use of TimesFM 3.0 is fully permitted through authorized Google Cloud services, including BigQuery ML, which are governed by the Google Cloud Terms of Service.

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Update - July 2, 2026

Updated PyPI to timesfm=2.0.2. See Install.

Update - Apr. 9, 2026

Added fine-tuning example using HuggingFace Transformers + PEFT (LoRA) — see timesfm-forecasting/examples/finetuning/. Also added unit tests (tests/) and incorporated several community fixes.

Shoutout to @kashif and @darkpowerxo.

Update - Mar. 19, 2026

Huge shoutout to @borealBytes for adding the support for AGENTS! TimesFM SKILL.md is out.

Update - Oct. 29, 2025

Added back the covariate support through XReg for TimesFM 2.5.

Update - Sept. 15, 2025

TimesFM 2.5 is out!

Comparing to TimesFM 2.0, this new 2.5 model:

• uses 200M parameters, down from 500M.
• supports up to 16k context length, up from 2048.
• supports continuous quantile forecast up to 1k horizon via an optional 30M quantile head.
• gets rid of the frequency indicator.
• has a couple of new forecasting flags.

Since the Sept. 2025 launch, the following improvements have been completed for TimesFM 2.5:

1. ✅ Flax version of the model for faster inference.
2. ✅ Covariate support via XReg (see Oct. 2025 update).
3. ✅ Documentation, examples, and agent skill (see timesfm-forecasting/).
4. ✅ Fine-tuning example with LoRA via HuggingFace Transformers + PEFT (see timesfm-forecasting/examples/finetuning/).
5. ✅ Unit tests for core layers, configs, and utilities (see tests/).

Install

From PyPI

# Install TimesFM with PyTorch
pip install timesfm[torch]

# Or, for MLX-native inference on Apple silicon (no PyTorch required)
pip install timesfm[mlx]

Local Install

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/google-research/timesfm.git
   cd timesfm
   

2. Create a virtual environment and install with PyTorch:

   # Using uv
   uv venv
   source .venv/bin/activate
   
    # Install the package in editable mode with torch
   uv pip install -e .[torch]
   

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Code Examples: TimesFM 3.0

1. Univariate Forecasting (Variable Lengths)

Pass a batch of 1D NumPy arrays of different context lengths to forecast univariate time series:

import numpy as np
from timesfm3 import TimesFM3Evaluator, ModelConfig

# Initialize TimesFM 3.0
config = ModelConfig(
    checkpoint_path="google/timesfm-3.0-pytorch",
    per_core_batch_size=32,
    device="cuda"
)
forecaster = TimesFM3Evaluator(config)

# Two univariate series of different lengths (100 and 72 steps)
ts1 = np.linspace(0, 1, 100).astype(np.float32)
ts2 = np.sin(np.linspace(0, 24, 72)).astype(np.float32)

# Generate forecast (point predictions + 9 quantiles: 0.1 to 0.9)
outputs = list(forecaster.predict_batch([ts1, ts2], horizon=12, return_quantiles=True, use_symmetric_averaging=False))

print("Series 1 forecast shape:", outputs[0].forecast.shape)   # (12,)
print("Series 1 quantiles shape:", outputs[0].quantiles.shape) # (12, 9)

print("Series 2 forecast shape:", outputs[1].forecast.shape)   # (12,)
print("Series 2 quantiles shape:", outputs[1].quantiles.shape) # (12, 9)

Apple Silicon: MLX backend

An MLX-native backend runs TimesFM 3.0 on Apple silicon without PyTorch. It mirrors the PyTorch TimesFM3Forecaster interface (predict / predict_batch, univariate or multivariate, with past-only and past-future covariates) and is numerically matched to it on google/timesfm-3.0-pytorch. Median forecast / quantile max abs error, context 512: 9.5e-7 / 1.8e-6 at horizon 64, 2.3e-6 / 2.7e-6 at horizon 128 (longer horizons stitch multiple output patches, so they are worth checking on their own).

import numpy as np
from timesfm3.mlx import TimesFM3Forecaster

forecaster = TimesFM3Forecaster.from_pretrained("google/timesfm-3.0-pytorch")

# Univariate, long horizon (>= 128 spans several output patches).
context = np.sin(np.linspace(0, 40, 512)).astype(np.float32)
out = forecaster.predict(context, horizon=128, return_quantiles=True)
print(out.forecast.shape)    # (128,)      median forecast
print(out.quantiles.shape)   # (128, 9)    9 deciles

# Batch many series through one forward pass.
outs = list(forecaster.predict_batch([context] * 32, horizon=128))

Multivariate targets and covariates work the same way as on the PyTorch backend (matched to 1.7e-6 on the checkpoint):

context_len, horizon = 256, 32

# Two target variates: (num_variates, context_len).
target = np.stack([
    np.sin(np.linspace(0, 24, context_len)),
    np.sin(np.linspace(1, 26, context_len)),
]).astype(np.float32)

past_only = np.random.randn(1, context_len).astype(np.float32)          # (1, 256)
past_future = np.sin(                                                    # (1, 256 + 32)
    np.linspace(0, 30, context_len + horizon)
)[None, :].astype(np.float32)

out = forecaster.predict(
    target,
    horizon=horizon,
    past_only_covariates=past_only,
    past_future_covariates=past_future,
    return_quantiles=True,
)
print(out.forecast.shape)    # (2, 32)     one forecast per target variate
print(out.quantiles.shape)   # (2, 32, 9)

Benchmarks (330M model, Apple M4 Max, context 512, horizon 64, fp32 with mx.compile):

batch	p50 latency	throughput
1	11.1 ms	90 series/s
8	19.7 ms	406 series/s
32	48.1 ms	666 series/s

Contexts longer than global_context (15,360) are truncated to their most recent points before decode, matching the PyTorch backend. use_symmetric_averaging, use_znorm, and padding_mode ("none" / "edge") are all supported and numerically matched to the PyTorch backend, so the MLX forecaster is a drop-in for the univariate and covariate forecasting paths.

2. Multivariate Forecasting with Covariates

Pass a 2D array of shape (num_variates, context_length) along with optional past-only and past-and-future covariates:

import numpy as np
from timesfm3 import TimesFM3Evaluator, ModelConfig

# Initialize TimesFM 3.0
config = ModelConfig(
    checkpoint_path="google/timesfm-3.0-pytorch",
    per_core_batch_size=16,
    device="cuda"
)
forecaster = TimesFM3Evaluator(config)

context_len = 128
horizon = 24

# 3 target variates across past context: (3, 128)
target = np.random.randn(3, context_len).astype(np.float32)

# 1 past-only covariate channel across past context: (1, 128)
past_only_cov = np.random.randn(1, context_len).astype(np.float32)

# 2 past-and-future covariate channels across context + horizon: (2, 152)
past_future_cov = np.random.randn(2, context_len + horizon).astype(np.float32)

# Generate joint forecast across all 3 target variates
outputs = list(
    forecaster.predict_batch(
        contexts=[target],
        horizon=horizon,
        past_only_covariates=[past_only_cov],
        past_future_covariates=[past_future_cov],
        return_quantiles=True,
        use_symmetric_averaging=False,
    )
)

print("Multivariate forecast shape:", outputs[0].forecast.shape)   # (3, 24)
print("Multivariate quantiles shape:", outputs[0].quantiles.shape) # (3, 24, 9)