Author Archives: Nikos

A fundamental idea in extrapolative forecasting

Extrapolative forecasting, using models such as exponential smoothing, is arguably not very complicated from a mathematical point of view, but it requires a shift in logic in terms of what is a good forecast. For this discussion I will use a simple form of exponential smoothing to demontrate my point. 1. The forecasting model: single… Read More: A fundamental idea in extrapolative forecasting »

ISIR 2016: Special session on `Estimating Demand Uncertainty’

I will be hosting a special session on Estimating Demand Uncertainty in the upcoming International Society for Inventory Research conference ISIR2016. The link between forecasting and inventory calculations is often not as clear as it should be. This is evident by the formulas used for the safety stock calculation: the expected demand and its uncertainty… Read More: ISIR 2016: Special session on `Estimating Demand Uncertainty’ »

Forecasting competition: Computational Intelligence in Forecasting

There is a new forecasting competition announced, the International Time Series Forecasting Competition “Computational Intelligence in Forecasting” CIF 2016. The competition is organised by Martin Stepnicka and Michal Burda within IEEE WCCI 2016 congress and it is related to a special session IJCNN-13 Advances in Computational Intelligence for Applied Time Series Forecasting (ACIATSF). For more… Read More: Forecasting competition: Computational Intelligence in Forecasting »

IIF Workshop on Supply Chain Forecasting for Operations

Lancaster Centre for Forecasting and Cardiff Business School, in collaboration with the IIF and SAS, are hosting a workshop on “Supply Chain Forecasting for Operations” on 28 and 29 June 2016 at Lancaster University, UK. The workshop is intended to stimulate forecasting research in the area of supply chain operations and selected papers will be… Read More: IIF Workshop on Supply Chain Forecasting for Operations »

Interactive simple exponential smoothing

Another interactive demo I created for the courses I teach. This one is about simple exponential smoothing and the main objective is to show the interaction between smoothing parameter and initial level in the fitting and holdout samples. A different interactive demo about exponential smoothing can be found here. A couple of points that may… Read More: Interactive simple exponential smoothing »

Another update for tsintermittent

Version 1.8 of tsintermittent has been submitted to CRAN and should be shortly available for download. Amongst various new checks on inputs to better accommodate handling multiple time series with data frames, a new option has been added to data.frc. When method=”auto” two things will happen: Function idclass(…,type=”PKa”) will be called to classify the time… Read More: Another update for tsintermittent »