EF-LLM: A Continual Learning-Based Framework for AI-Assisted Automation, Enhanced Sparse Prediction, and Hallucination Detection

Practical time-series forecasting requires domain knowledge, constraints, plausibility checks, and human intervention. We present CastClaw, an interactive forecasting system centered on an autonomous forecasting loop and supported by a forecasting-oriented harness. Users create and refine tasks in natural language through command-line and Web interfaces. An internal large language model (LLM) agent reads the task and evidence, selects a permitted tool action or request for human feedback, and uses checked results to decide whether to continue, revisit an analysis, switch a candidate, or stop. The harness supplies tool integration, controlled execution, state management, historical validation, and execution limits. npm distribution connects installation and configuration to interactive execution and forecast and report export. Across five public electricity-price datasets, CastClaw achieves the lowest point-estimate MSE and MAE among 16 baselines. A Nord Pool case study illustrates its inspectable decision process, while provincial electricity-load data from North China (January--June 2026) demonstrate offline task execution.

The rising cost and demand for energy, together with environmental sustainability goals, create major challenges for energy management. Energy Consumption Forecasting (ECF) supports planning by predicting future consumption, but Machine Learning (ML) models for ECF often depend on expert-driven Feature Engineering (FE). This thesis addresses that dependence through three contributions. First, it establishes and evaluates a comprehensive FE pipeline for ECF and investigates domain-specific features. Second, it introduces AutoEnergy, a domain-tailored automated FE algorithm that generates interpretable features from timestamps and lagged consumption and integrates with AutoML for end-to-end ECF modelling. Across eighteen real-world energy datasets spanning residential, commercial, industrial, renewable, and grid domains, AutoEnergy reduces forecasting error by 19.52%-84.72% relative to baseline AutoML and established automated FE methods, while running 1.31-4.41 times faster, with gains varying by dataset. Third, AutoEnergy is integrated with Decision-Focused Learning (DFL) for a Battery Energy Storage System problem, jointly forecasting electricity prices and demand while optimising charging and discharging decisions. On a real-world UK property dataset, this approach reduces operating costs by 22.9%-56.5% compared with the same DFL models without automated FE. Overall, the results show that domain-specific automated FE can reduce reliance on manual feature design, improve forecasting accuracy, and translate predictive gains into measurable operational benefits in energy management.

Large language models (LLMs) now support forecasting systems that combine language-based reasoning with temporal data, evidence retrieval, external tools, and iterative prediction. We investigate LLM-based forecasting agents, meaning systems in which a language model contributes to a scored prediction about a future or currently unobserved target. We organize architectures into three groups. Standalone LLM workflows operate on encoded time series or event context. Tool- and retrieval-augmented agents incorporate external evidence. Hybrid systems pair LLMs with statistical or foundation models. We then review training methods and evaluation protocols. We examine negative as well as positive evidence, including sensitivity to small input perturbations, ablations in which the LLM component does not improve accuracy, and benchmark gains that may reflect contamination instead of temporal reasoning. We cover applications in finance, weather, health, energy, and operations, and we summarize the benchmarks and datasets used for evaluation. The evidence indicates that measurement is a central limitation. Future work requires calibration under distribution shift, contamination-resistant live evaluation, explicit reporting of cost and accuracy together, and methods for handling feedback between deployed forecasts and the outcomes being forecast.