## M4 Forecasting Competition update

The official guidelines for the M4 competition have now been published, and there have been several developments since my last post on this. There is now a prize for prediction interval accuracy using a scaled version of the Mean Interval Score. If the $100(1-\alpha)$% prediction interval for time $t$ is given by $[L_{t},U_{t}]$, for $t=1,\dots,h$, then the MIS is defined as $$\frac{1}{h}\sum_{t=1}^{h} \left[ (U_t-L_t) + \frac{2}{\alpha}(L_t-Y_t)1(Y_t < L_t) + \frac{2}{\alpha}(Y_t-U_t)1(Y_t > U_t) \right]$$ where $Y_t$ is the observation at time $t$.

## Data Science for Managers: May 2018

For the last few years, I have been involved with running a 3-day short course on “Data Science for Managers”. We have run it twice each year since 2015, and it continues to prove very popular. We have some awesome presenters including Monash University professors Di Cook, Geoff Webb, and Kim Marriott, as well as several very experienced data scientists working in industry. The next course will be held on 8-10 May 2018.

## Recent publications

• Fotios Petropoulos, Rob J Hyndman, Christoph Bergmeir (2018) Exploring the sources of uncertainty: why does bagging for time series forecasting work?. European Journal of Operational Research, to appear. Abstract DOI  pdf
• Rob J Hyndman, Xueqin Lin, Pierre Pinson (2018) Visualizing big energy data. IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, to appear. Abstract DOI
• Christoph Bergmeir, Rob J Hyndman, Bonsoo Koo (2018) A note on the validity of cross-validation for evaluating autoregressive time series prediction. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 120, 70-83. Abstract DOI  pdf
• Tetteh Dugbaza, Fadwa Al-Yaman, Tracy Dixon, Richard Solon, Ching Choi, Rob Hyndman, Len Smith (2017) Trends in Indigenous mortality and life expectancy 2001-2015. Cat. no. IHW 174. Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Abstract Online

## Recent and upcoming seminars

• Probabilistic outlier detection and visualization of smart metre data. (13 December 2017) More info...