Bridging Tabular Foundation Models and Commodity Price Forecasting: Toward Scalable, Privacy-Aware Data Science for Web-Generated Economic Data
P Paramasivaiah
Journal of Data Processing, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2026.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6025/jdp/2026/16/1/31-45
Link: https://www.dline.info/jdp/fulltext/v16n1/jdpv16n1_3.pdf
Abstract:
This paper explores the intersection of two critical frontiers in data science: the rise of foundation models for
tabular data and their practical application to forecasting in complex, real world domains specifically
global commodity markets. The study leverages the World Bank's Pink Sheet dataset (1960-2025) to analyze
long term price dynamics and evaluate forecasting methodologies across energy, metal, and agricultural
commodities. Empirical results show that traditional time series models like SARIMAX excel in stable, seasonal
contexts, while machine learning approaches particularly Random Forest better capture nonlinearities and
structural breaks during periods of high volatility, such as those observed during the 2020 pandemic shock.
In parallel, the paper reviews recent breakthroughs in tabular foundation models, including TabPFN, TabICL,
and TabFM, which challenge the longstanding dominance of gradient boosted trees by enabling in context
learning, zero shot generalization, and instruction following capabilities. These models leverage synthetic
pretraining and novel architectures to achieve competitive or superior performance on small to medium
datasets. Despite these advances, the potential of foundation models for tabular data distillation compressing
large datasets while preserving statistical fidelity remains underexplored. The authors argue that extending
foundation models beyond prediction to tasks like dataset compression, synthetic generation, and privacypreserving
representation could address key challenges in web science, including scalability, reproducibility,
and data sharing.
The paper concludes by advocating a dual research trajectory: advancing neural architectures tailored to
tabular structure and broadening their scope from predictive modeling to data centric infrastructure. This
integrated vision promises more efficient, generalizable, and ethically robust tools for managing the growing
complexity of real world tabular data.