Hyndsight

Thoughts on research, forecasting, statistics, and other distractions.

Topics covered

All Hyndsight posts by date

Poll position: statistics and the Australian federal election

26 May 2019

One of the few people in Australia who did not write off a possible Coalition win at the recent federal election was Peter Ellis. We’ve invited him to come and give a talk about making sense of opinion polls and the Australian federal election on Friday this week at Monash University. Visitors are welcome. Here are the details. 11am, 31 May 2019. Room G03, Learning and Teaching Building, 19 Ancora Imparo Way, Clayton Campus, Monash University

You are what you vote

17 May 2019

politics, statistics, R

I’ve tried my hand at writing for the wider public with an article for The Conversation based on my paper with Di Cook and Jeremy Forbes on “Spatial modelling of the two-party preferred vote in Australian federal elections: 2001-2016”. With the next Australian election taking place tomorrow, we thought it was timely to put out a publicly accessible version of our analysis.

Translations of "Forecasting: principles and practice"

23 April 2019

forecasting, fpp, otexts, references, writing

There are now translations of my forecasting textbook (coauthored with George Athanasopoulos) into Chinese and Korean. The Chinese translation was produced by a team led by Professor Yanfei Kang (Beihang University) and Professor Feng Li (Central University of Finance and Economics). The following students were also involved: Cheng Fan, Liu Yu, Long Xiaoyu, Wang Xiaoqian, Zeng Jiayue, Zhang Bohan, and Zhu Shuaidong. The Korean translation was produced by Dr Daniel Young Ho Kim.

Post-docs in wind and solar power forecasting

21 February 2019

forecasting, energy, R, time series

We currently have two postdoc opportunities together with an industry partner in the field of wind and solar power forecasting (full time, Level B). They are suitable for recently graduated PhD students that can start between now and June-July. The opportunities are as follows: Wind power forecasting: 1 year contract Good programming skills in R and/or Python Solid background in Machine Learning and/or Statistics Background in time series forecasting desirable Solar power forecasting: 6 months contract Good programming skills in R and/or Python Solid background in Machine Learning and/or Statistics Data will be cloud coverage data from sky cams, so some image processing background is necessary Background in time series forecasting desirable Please contact Christoph Bergmeir if you are interested.

Advice to PhD applicants

25 January 2019

computing, mathematics, statistics, supervision

For students who are interested in doing a PhD at Monash under my supervision. First, check that you satisfy the following criteria: You must have completed a degree in statistics that involved some research component (e.g., an honours or masters thesis). A degree in computer science, mathematics or econometrics might be acceptable if it contained a substantial amount of statistics. A degree in any other field is not sufficient background to work with me.

forecast 8.5

18 January 2019

forecasting, graphics, R, time series

The latest minor release of the forecast package has now been approved on CRAN and should be available in the next day or so. Version 8.5 contains the following new features Updated tsCV() to handle exogenous regressors. Reimplemented naive(), snaive(), rwf() for substantial speed improvements. Added support for passing arguments to auto.arima() unit root tests. Improved auto.arima() stepwise search algorithm (some neighbouring models were missed previously). We haven’t done a major release for two years, and there is unlikely to be another one now.

Network for early career researchers in forecasting

22 December 2018

forecasting, conferences

The International Institute of Forecasters has established interest group sections, devoted to specialized domains of forecasting. One of the first such sections will be for early career researchers. So if you are a PhD student, post-doc, or otherwise a relatively junior researcher working in forecasting, this is for you! The first events will be during the ISF in Thessaloniki in June 2019, including the following: ECR welcoming event. A meet and greet event prior to the ISF welcome reception.

Why doesn't auto.arima() return the model with the lowest AICc value?

18 December 2018

This question seems to come up frequently on crossvalidated.com or in my inbox. I have this time series, however it yields different results when I use the auto.arima and Arima functions. library(forecast) xd <- ts(c(23786, 25955, 54373, 21561, 14552, 13284, 12714, 11821, 15445, 21307, 17228, 20007, 23065, 32811, 43147, 15127, 13497, 12224, 11412, 11888, 14210,18978, 15782, 17216, 16417, 22861, 42616, 17057, 9741, 10503, 7170, 10686, 9762, 15773, 15280, 13212, 14784, 26104, 29947), frequency = 12, start=c(2014,1), end=c(2017,3)) fit1 <- auto.

Using ggplot2 for functional time series

12 December 2018

time series, R, graphics

This week I’ve been attending the Functional Data and Beyond workshop at the Matrix centre in Creswick. I spoke yesterday about using ggplot2 for functional data graphics, rather than the custom-built plotting functionality available in the many functional data packages, including my own rainbow package written with Hanlin Shang. It is a much more powerful and flexible way to work, so I thought it would be useful to share some examples.

M4 Forecasting Conference

28 November 2018

forecasting, R, reproducible research, time series, conferences

Following the highly successful M4 Forecasting Competition, there will be a conference held on 10-11 December at Tribeca Rooftop, New York, to discuss the results. The conference will elaborate on the findings of the M4 Competition, with prominent speakers from leading business firms (Amazon, Uber, Google, Microsoft, SAS, and ProLogistica) and top universities. Nassim Nicholas Taleb will deliver a keynote address about uncertainty in forecasting and elaborate on his claims that “tail risks are much worse now than in 2007” while Spyros Makridakis will discuss how organizations can benefit by improving the accuracy of their predictions and assessing uncertainty realistically.