# The thief package for R: Temporal HIErarchical Forecasting

I have a new R package available to do temporal hierarchical forecasting, based on my paper with George Athanasopoulos, Nikolaos Kourentzes and Fotios Petropoulos. (Guess the odd guy out there!)

It is called “thief” – an acronym for Temporal HIErarchical Forecasting. The idea is to take a seasonal time series, and compute all possible temporal aggregations that result in an integer number of observations per year. For example, a quarterly time series is aggregated to biannual and annual; while a monthly time series is aggregated to 2-monthly, quarterly, 4-monthly, biannual and annual. Each of the resulting time series are forecast, and then the forecasts are reconciled using the hierarchical reconciliation algorithm described in our paper.

It turns out that this tends to give better forecasts, even though no new information has been added, especially for time series with long seasonal periods. It also allows different types of forecasts for different forecast horizons to be combined in a consistent manner.

# “Forecasting with R” short course in Eindhoven

I will be giving my 3-day short-course/workshop on “Forecasting with R” in Eindhoven (Netherlands) from 19-21 October.

Register here

# Tourism time series repository

A few years ago, I wrote a paper with George Athanasopoulos and others about a tourism forecasting competition. We originally made the data available as an online supplement to the paper, but that has unfortunately since disappeared although the paper itself is still available.

So I am posting the data here in case anyone wants to use it for replicating our results, or for other research purposes. The data are split into monthly, quarterly and yearly data. There are 366 monthly series, 427 quarterly series and 518 yearly series. Each group of series is further split into training data and test data. Further information is provided in the paper.

If you use the data in a publication, please cite the IJF paper as the source, along with a link to this blog post.

# The latest IJF issue with GEFCom2014 results

The latest issue of the IJF is a bumper issue with over 500 pages of forecasting insights.

The GEFCom2014 papers are included in a special section on probabilistic energy forecasting, guest edited by Tao Hong and Pierre Pinson. This is a major milestone in energy forecasting research with the focus on probabilistic forecasting and forecast evaluation done using a quantile scoring method. Only a few years ago I was having to explain to energy professionals why you couldn’t use a MAPE to evaluate a percentile forecast. With this special section, we now have a tutorial review on probabilistic electric load forecasting by Tao Hong and Shu Fan, which should help everyone get up to speed with current forecasting approaches, evaluation methods and common misunderstandings. The section also contains a large number of very high quality articles showing how to do state-of-the-art density forecasting for electricity load, electricity price, solar and wind power. Moreover, we have some benchmarks on publicly available data sets so future researchers can easily compare their methods against these published results.

In addition to the special section on probabilistic energy forecasting, there is an invited review paper on call centre forecasting by Ibrahim, Ye, L’Ecuyer and Shen. This is an important area in practice, and this paper provides a helpful review of the literature, a summary of the key issues in building good models, and suggests some possible future research directions.

There is also an invited paper from Blasques, Koopman, Łasak and Lucas on “In-sample confidence bands and out-of-sample forecast bands for time-varying parameters in observation-driven models” with some great discussion from Catherine Forbes and Pierre Perron. This was the subject of Siem Jan Koopman’s ISF talk in 2014.

Finally, there are 18 regular contributed papers, more than we normally publish in a whole issue, on topics ranging from forecasting excess stock returns to demographics of households, from forecasting food prices, to evaluating forecasts of counts and intermittent demand. Check them all out on ScienceDirect.

# 2017 International Symposium on Energy Analytics

### Predictive Energy Analytics in the Big Data World

#### ISEA2017

This will be a great conference, and it is in a great location — Cairns, Australia, right by the Great Barrier Reef. Even better, if you stay on you can attend the International Symposium on Forecasting which immediately follows the International Symposium on Energy Analytics.

So block out 22-28 June 2017 on your calendars so you can enjoy a tropical paradise in one of the most beautiful parts of Australia, while attending two awesome conferences.

# forecast v7 and ggplot2 graphics

Version 7 of the forecast package was released on CRAN about a month ago, but I'm only just getting around to posting about the new features.

The most visible feature was the introduction of ggplot2 graphics. I first wrote the forecast package before ggplot2 existed, and so only base graphics were available. But I figured it was time to modernize and use the nice features available from ggplot2. The following examples illustrate the main new graphical functionality.

For illustration purposes, I'm using the male and female monthly deaths from lung diseases in the UK.

# 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.

 library(forecast)   f1 = forecast(auto.arima(Nile, lambda=0), h=20, level=95) f2 = forecast(ets(Nile), h=20, level=95)   plot(f1, shadecol=rgb(0,0,1,.4), flwd=1, main="Forecasts of Nile River flow", xlab="Year", ylab="Billions of cubic metres") polygon(c(time(f2$mean),rev(time(f2$mean))), c(f2$lower,rev(f2$upper)), col=rgb(1,0,0,.4), border=FALSE) lines(f2\$mean, col=rgb(.7,0,0)) legend("bottomleft", fill=c(rgb(0,0,1,.4),rgb(1,0,0,.4)), col=c("blue","red"), lty=1, legend=c("ARIMA","ETS"))

The blue region shows 95% prediction intervals for the ARIMA forecasts, while the red region shows 95% prediction intervals for the ETS forecasts. Where they overlap, the colors blend to make purple. In this case, the point forecasts are quite close, but the prediction intervals are relatively different.

# Model variance for ARIMA models

From today’s email:

I wanted to ask you about your R forecast package, in particular the Arima() function. We are using this function to fit an ARIMAX model and produce model estimates and standard errors, which in turn can be used to get p-values and later model forecasts. To double check our work, we are also fitting the same model in SAS using PROC ARIMA and comparing model coefficients and output. Continue reading →