Material for `Forecasting with R: A practical workshop”

Together with Fotios Petropoulos we gave a workshop on producing forecasts with R, at the International Symposium on Forecasting, 2016. You can find the material of the workshop here. The workshop notes assume knowledge of what the various forecasting methods do, which are only briefly explained in the workshop’s slides, and mostly focuses in showing which functions to use and how, so as to perform a wide variety of forecasting tasks:

• Time series exploration
• Univariate (extrapolative) forecasting
• Intermittent demand series forecasting
• Forecasting with regression
• Special topics: (i) Hierarchical forecasting; (ii) ABC-XYZ analysis; and (iii) LASSO regression

Material:

1. Workshop notes: these provide code examples with comments. You will also find some references for the various methods used in the workshop.
2. Workshop slides: these provide an extremely brief overview of some of the methods used and their implementation.
3. Workshop R solution scripts: these replicate the examples in the notes.
4. Workshop data: these are needed to replicate the examples in the notes and scripts.

The notes are aimed at researchers and experienced practitioners, who are comfortable with the theory behind the various models and methods. Nonetheless, they demonstrate how to quickly explore data, fit models, produce forecasts and evaluate them for a wide range of cases. I hope you find this material useful.