85K Parameters Is Not a Deployment Plan
TL;DR for operators Fracast-01 reduces a probabilistic time-series foundation model to 85,001 parameters. Against TinyCast, that is a 42.0% parameter reduction, while TinyCast retains 4.2% lower aggregate MASE and 3.3% lower aggregate WQL. The smaller model is therefore an efficiency point, not an accuracy winner. The trade-off is uneven. Fracast-0 is close to TinyCast at short horizons, especially on probabilistic forecast quality, but the gap widens at medium and long horizons. Its weakest reported frequency group is secondly data, where normalized MASE rises above the Seasonal Naive baseline. ...