Hyndsight

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

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Using ggplot2 for functional time series

12 December 2018

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.

MeDaScIn 2018

26 August 2018

conferences, data science, seminars, forecasting, R

The annual Melbourne Data Science Initiative (or MeDaScIn, pronounced medicine) is on again next month (24-27 September) with lots of tutorials, and the annual datathon. This year there will be a “Forecasting with R” workshop (25 September) led my two of my Monash colleagues – George Athanasopoulos and Elena Sanina. Another great tutorial will be led by Steph Kovalchik (from Tennis Australia) on sports analytics with R (24 September). For the full list of tutorials, see the MeDaScIn website.

National Science Week Melbourne Mathematics Activities

6 August 2018

seminars, acems, mathematics, Monash University

Next week is National Science Week and there are a few mathematics activities happening around Melbourne that are being sponsored by ACEMS. Elsewhere in Melbourne: Mon 13 Aug 2018, 6:00pm - 7:30pm Public Talk: Is this your card? Location: University of Melbourne Speakers: Anthony Mays & Jen Palisse Pick a card, any card! The immortal phrase of the magician. In this talk, we’ll look at some great card tricks that have simple maths behind them.

Saving ts objects as csv files

3 August 2018

time series, R

Occasionally R might not be the tool you want to use (hard to believe, but apparently that happens). Then you may need to export some data from R via a csv file. When the data is stored as a ts object, the time index can easily get lost. So I wrote a little function to make this easier, using the tsibble package to do almost all of the work in looking after the time index.

UseR!2018 talks

15 July 2018

All talks from useR!2018, held in Brisbane last week, are now available on YouTube.

Links to talks from members of my research team are given below.

Seasonal decomposition of short time series

14 July 2018

seasonality, time series, R

Many users have tried to do a seasonal decomposition with a short time series, and hit the error “Series has less than two periods”. The problem is that the usual methods of decomposition (e.g., decompose and stl) estimate seasonality using at least as many degrees of freedom as there are seasonal periods. So you need at least two observations per seasonal period to be able to distinguish seasonality from noise.

A forecast ensemble benchmark

24 June 2018

forecasting, time series, R

Forecasting benchmarks are very important when testing new forecasting methods, to see how well they perform against some simple alternatives. Every week I get sent papers proposing new forecasting methods that fail to do better than even the simplest benchmark. They are rejected without review. Typical benchmarks include the naïve method (especially for finance and economic data), the seasonal naïve method (for seasonal data), an automatically selected ETS model, and an automatically selected ARIMA model.

Forecasting in NYC: 25-27 June 2018

23 April 2018

forecasting, time series, R, conferences, data science

In late June, I will be in New York to teach my 3-day workshop on Forecasting using R. Tickets are available at Eventbrite. This is the first time I’ve taught this workshop in the US, having previously run it in the Netherlands and Australia. It will be based on the 2nd edition of my book “Forecasting: Principles and Practice” with George Athanasopoulos. All participants will get a print version of the book.

Upcoming talks: May-July 2018

23 April 2018

forecasting, time series, R, conferences, data science

First semester teaching is nearly finished, and that means conference season for me. Here are some talks I’m giving in the next two months. Click the links for more details. Melbourne, Australia. 28 May: Panel discussion: Forecasting models, the uncertainties and associated risk Boulder, Colorado, USA. 17-20 June: International Symposium on Forecasting. I’ll be talking about “Tidy forecasting in R”. New York, USA. 21 June: Feature-based time series analysis. New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup, eBay NYC.