Today I read a paper that had been submitted to the IJF which included the following figure along with several similar plots. (Click for a larger version.) I haven’t seen anything this bad for a long time. In fact, I think I would find it very difficult to reproduce using R, or even Excel (which […]
GEFCom 2014 is the most advanced energy forecasting competition ever organized, both in terms of the data involved, and in terms of the way the forecasts will be evaluated. So everyone interested in energy forecasting should head over to the competition webpage and start forecasting: www.gefcom.org. This time, the competition is hosted on CrowdANALYTIX rather than Kaggle. […]
At the IIF annual board meeting last month in Rotterdam, I suggested that we provide awards to the top students studying forecasting at university level around the world, to the tune of $100 plus IIF membership for a year. I’m delighted that the idea met with enthusiasm, and that the awards are now available. Even […]
Every year, the International Institute of Forecasters in conjunction with SAS offer some small grants to help promote research in forecasting. There are two $5000 grants per year for research on forecasting methodology and applications. This year, app...
The MAPE (mean absolute percentage error) is a popular measure for forecast accuracy and is defined as where denotes an observation and denotes its forecast, and the mean is taken over . Armstrong (1985, p.348) was the first (to my knowledge) to point out the asymmetry of the MAPE saying that “it has a bias favoring estimates that are below the actual values”. A few years later, Armstrong…
The IJF is introducing occasional review papers on areas of forecasting. We did a whole issue in 2006 reviewing 25 years of research since the International Institute of Forecasters was established. Since then, there has been a lot of new work in application areas such as call center forecasting and electricity price forecasting. In addition, there are areas we did not cover in 2006 including new product forecasting and forecasting…
This is a short piece I wrote for the next issue of the Oracle newsletter produced by the International Institute of Forecasters. Special section topics We continue to publish special sections on selected topics. Because of the change in the way regular papers are now handled, we do not publish whole special issues any more. Rather, each issue has regular papers at the front, and if there are any special…
The 2012 GEFcom competition was a great success with several new innovative forecasting methods introduced. These have been published in the IJF as follows: Hong, Pinson and Fan. Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012 Charleton and Singleton. A refined parametric model for short term load forecasting Lloyd. GEFCom2012 hierarchical load forecasting: Gradient boosting machines and Gaussian processes Nedelec, Cugliari and Goude: GEFCom2012: Electric load forecasting and backcasting with semi-parametric models Ben Taieb and Hyndman. A…
Every year or so, Elsevier asks me to nominate five International Journal of Forecasting papers from the last two years to highlight in their marketing materials as “Editor’s Choice”. I try to select papers across a broad range of subjects, and I take into account citations and downloads as well as my own impression of the paper. That tends to bias my selection a little towards older papers as they have…
