# Melbourne Data Science Initiative 2016

In just over three weeks, the inaugural MeDaScIn event will take place. This is an initiative to grow the talent pool of local data scientists and to promote Melbourne as a world city of excellence in Data Science.

The main event takes place on Friday 6th May, with lots of interesting sounding titles and speakers from business and government. I’m the only academic speaker on the program, giving the closing talk on “Automatic FoRecasting”. Earlier in the day I am running a forecasting workshop where I will discuss forecasting issues and answer questions for about 90 minutes. There are still a few places left for the main event, and for the workshops. Book soon if you want to attend.

All the details are here.

# Plotting overlapping prediction intervals

I often see figures with two sets of prediction intervals plotted on the same graph using different line types to distinguish them. The results are almost always unreadable. A better way to do this is to use semi-transparent shaded regions. Here is an example showing two sets of forecasts for the Nile River flow.

# forecast package v6.2

It is a while since I last updated the CRAN version of the forecast package, so I uploaded the latest version (6.2) today. The github version remains the most up-to-date version and is already two commits ahead of the CRAN version.

This update is mostly bug fixes and additional error traps. The full ChangeLog is listed below. Continue reading →

# Stanford seminar

I gave a seminar at Stanford today. Slides are below. It was definitely the most intimidating audience I’ve faced, with Jerome Friedman, Trevor Hastie, Brad Efron, Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes, David Donoho and John Chambers all present (and probably other famous names I’ve missed).

I’ll be giving essentially the same talk at UC Davis on Thursday. Continue reading →