ECHO: Correcting Time Series Foundation Model Forecasts with Historical Analogues and Errors

Abstract

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) provide general-purpose forecasting capabilities, yet their forecasts can remain misaligned with the temporal characteristics of a target domain. This motivates lightweight forecast correction even when only black-box access to the TSFM is available. Our key observation is that two forms of historical information provide complementary correction signals: historical analogues reveal how similar contexts evolved, while past forecast errors reveal a TSFM's characteristic deviations in the target domain. Based on this observation, we propose ECHO, a black-box forecast correction framework that learns from both sources. ECHO uses AnalogE to assess retrieved historical analogues together with the current context and base forecast, learning transferable corrections through cross-domain pretraining. In parallel, RecentE learns target-specific residual corrections from past forecast errors and refines them as causally available feedback accumulates. ECHO dynamically combines the two corrections according to their observed forecasting performance. Across 5 representative TSFMs and 9 real-world datasets, ECHO reduces MSE in all 45 backbone--dataset settings, yielding an average relative reduction of 9.26\% in macro-average MSE. Its gains also extend to long-horizon forecasting.