Time Series Foundation Models are Flow Predictors

Abstract: We investigate the effectiveness of time series foundation models (TSFMs) for crowd flow prediction, focusing on Moirai and TimesFM. Evaluated on three real-world mobility datasets-Bike NYC, Taxi Beijing, and Spanish national OD flows-these models are deployed in a strict zero-shot setting, using only the temporal evolution of each OD flow and no explicit spatial information. Moirai and TimesFM outperform both statistical and deep learning baselines, achieving up to 33% lower RMSE, 39% lower MAE and up to 49% higher CPC compared to state-of-the-art competitors. Our results highlight the practical value of TSFMs for accurate, scalable flow prediction, even in scenarios with limited annotated data or missing spatial context.