I often get email from forecasters wanting assistance. As much as I’d like to provide a free forecasting advice service to the world, that’s not what I’m paid to do, and I choose to spend my unpaid time on other things. However, there are some very helpful resources available for forecasting practitioners.
First, every practicing forecaster [...]
Posts about forecasting
I wrote last week that “macroeconomic forecasts are little better than shooting blindfold”. I don’t know if it was connected or not, but on the same day a journalist (Richard Pullin) from Reuters phoned me to ask about assessing some economic forecasts. He wanted to compare the accuracy of several economic forecasts for Japan [...]
It may come as a shock to discover that a statistician does not like statistical tests. Isn’t that what statistics is all about? Unfortunately, in some disciplines statistical analysis does seem to consist almost entirely of hypothesis testing, and therein lies the problem.
The standard practice is to construct a hypothesis test to determine if some [...]
Forecasting the recession
Aug 18
Forecasters are under the pump with a recession that many didn’t see coming. As I don’t do any macroeconomic forecasting, I can sit back and smile smugly at some of my colleagues while I work on simpler problems such as forecasting in epidemiology, demography and energy demand.
Some of those colleagues are cited in the Wall [...]
Sir Clive Granger has died at the age of 74. There are some nice obituaries in the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Also, his Wikipedia page has some good information. I met Clive on several occasions and he was “a scholar and a gentleman”, a remarkably humble man given his outstanding achievements and [...]
Prediction markets
May 18
Andrew Leigh has a nice piece in today’s AFR on forecasting via prediction markets
Dodgy forecasting
Mar 13
A few years ago I did some forecasting work for a commonwealth government department and found that they were forecasting a $5 billion budget using the FORECAST command in Excel. Worse, they were fitting a regression through only three observations and they were not even the most recent observations.
It seems a similar thing has happened [...]
Forecasting in the news
Sep 6
There’s an interesting article in today’s Age on the difficulty of long term forecasting. This is an area into which I won’t venture as it requires a strong belief in the idea that the future is just like the observed past.
I am willing to make that assumption in some contexts, and for short-term forecasts, [...]
