This is a new competition being organized by EuroStat. The first phase involves nowcasting economic indicators at national and European level including unemployment, HICP, Tourism and Retail Trade and some of their variants. The main goal of the competition is to discover promising methodologies and data sources that could, now or in the future, be […]
I’m currently visiting Taiwan and I’m giving two seminars while I’m here — one at the National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, and the other at Academia Sinica in Taipei. Details are below for those who might be nearby. Automatic Time Series Forecasting College of Technology Management, Institute of Service Science, National Tsing Hua University, […]
Amongst today’s email was one from someone running a private competition to classify time series. Here are the essential details. The data are measurements from a medical diagnostic machine which takes 1 measurement every second, and after 32–1000 seconds, the time series must be classified into one of two classes. Some pre-classified training data is […]
Competitions have a long history in forecasting and prediction, and have been instrumental in forcing research attention on methods that work well in practice. In the forecasting community, the M competition and M3 competition have been particularly influential. The data mining community have the annual KDD cup which has generated attention on a wide range […]
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. […]
We have an exciting new initiative at Monash University with some new positions in business analytics. This is part of a plan to strengthen our research and teaching in the data science/computational statistics area. We are hoping to make multiple appointments, at junior and senior levels. These are five-year appointments, but we hope that the positions will continue after that if we can secure suitable funding. What is business analytics?…
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…
Random Forests are awesome. They do not overfit, they are easy to tune, they tell you about important variables, they can be used for classification and regression, they are implemented in many programming languages and they are faster than their competitors (neural nets, boosting, support vector machines, ...)Let us take a moment to appreciate them:The Random Forest™ is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me watch the mean squared…
I've had a lot of different jobs over the past 4 years, and I've had some incredible experiences along the way. Lately, I've been struggling with what to do next. Or perhaps more accurately, I've been struggling with how to decide what to do next. Decisions that seem obvious in hindsight are tough to come to grips with beforehand, and it's led me to think about what metric I am…
The International Journal of Forecasting is calling for papers on probabilistic energy forecasting. Here are the details (taken from Tao Hong’s blog). In today’s competitive and dynamic environment, more and more decision making processes in the energy industry are relying on probabilistic forecasts. The applications of probabilistic energy forecasts spread across planning and operations of the entire energy value chain. We are seeking papers from researchers working on the areas…
