Automatic time series forecasting: the forecast package for R

Published on 16 July 2008 in Refereed papers

Journal of Stat­ist­ical Soft­ware (2008), 27(3)

Rob J. Hyndman and Yeas­min Khandakar

Abstract: Auto­matic fore­casts of large num­bers of uni­vari­ate time series are often needed in busi­ness and other con­texts. We describe two auto­matic fore­cast­ing algorithms that have been imple­men­ted in the fore­cast pack­age for R. The first is based on innov­a­tion state space mod­els that underly expo­nen­tial smooth­ing meth­ods. The second is based on ARIMA mod­els. The algorithms are applic­able to both sea­sonal and non-​​seasonal data, and are com­pared and illus­trated using four real time series. We also briefly describe some of the other func­tion­al­ity avail­able in the fore­cast package.

Keywords: ARIMA mod­els, auto­matic fore­cast­ing, expo­nen­tial smooth­ing, pre­dic­tion inter­vals, state space mod­els, time series, R.