The Spectrum Is Not Enough: When Context Helps Time-Series Forecasting

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Original abstract

A growing family of indices scores how predictable a series is from its spectrum. Practitioners increasingly read these scores as answering a different question: whether \emph{adding context}, a longer lookback, a retrieval plug-in, or a pretrained model, will help. These are not the same question. The value of context is a property of the operating point, not of the series. Any index built from the power spectrum is invariant under phase randomization, whereas the beyond-second-order value that retrieval and foundation models supply is not, because a phase-randomized series is asymptotically Gaussian. We state this as an impossibility result and isolate it with surrogate pairs that fix the spectrum and the marginal by construction. We then give a label-free, configuration-level diagnostic, the coverage deficit, whose principal term measures beyond-spectrum structure as the gain of analog over linear prediction. On seven benchmarks the prediction holds: window-keyed retrieval's value collapses across surrogate pairs (ECL median $+33\%\!\to\!-35\%$, $p{<}10^{-40}$) while every spectral index stays frozen; a foundation model's value splits into a surviving second-order part and a small beyond-linear margin that collapses; a longer linear window's value survives. Leave-one-dataset-out, the structure term predicts the sign of beyond-spectrum value where the spectral indices trail it, and the reverse holds for the second-order mechanism. We introduce no new forecaster; the contribution is the distinction, a controlled comparison, and a diagnostic for the deployment decision. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SINE.

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