Tourism forecasting competition ends
And the winners are … Jeremy Howard and Lee C Baker. (See my earlier post for information about the competition.)
Jeremy describes his approach to seasonal time series in a blog post on Kaggle.com. Lee described his approach to annual time series in an earlier post.
A few lessons that come out of this:
For data from a single industry, using a global trend (i.e., estimated across all series) can be useful.
Combining forecasts is a good idea. (This lesson seems to be re-learned in every forecasting competition!)
The MASE can be very sensitive to a few series, and to optimize MASE it is worth concentrating on these. (This is actually not a good message for forecasting overall, as we want good forecasts for all series. Maybe we need to find a metric with similar properties to MASE but with a less skewed distribution.)
Outlier removal before forecasting can be effective. (This is an interesting result as outlier removal algorithms used in the M3 competition did not help forecast accuracy.)
Jeremy and Lee receive $500 for their efforts and they have decided to donate their prize money to the Fred Hollows Foundation. $500 will restore vision to 20 people. They will also write up their methods in more detail for the International Journal of Forecasting. I am hopeful that Philip Brierley of team Sali Mali (who did very well in the second stage of the competition) will also write a short explanation of his methods for the IJF.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the competition. Thanks also to Anthony Goldbloom from Kaggle for hosting the competition. Kaggle is a wonderful platform for prediction competitions and I hope it will be used for many more competitions of this type in the future.