Forecast: Mostly Context with a Chance of Routing
Large language models can forecast surprisingly well when you hand them the right context. But naïve prompts leave money on the table. Today’s paper introduces four plug‑and‑play strategies—ReDP, CorDP, IC‑DP, RouteDP—that lift accuracy, interpretability, and cost‑efficiency without training new models. Here’s what that means for teams running demand, risk, or ops forecasts. Why this matters for business readers Most production forecasts are numeric workhorses (ARIMA/ETS/TS foundation models), while contextual facts—weather advisories, policy changes, promos, strikes—arrive as text. LLMs can read that text and adjust the forecast, but simply stuffing history+context into a prompt (“direct prompting”) is often fragile. The four strategies below are operational patterns you can drop into existing stacks without re‑architecting. ...