Yesterday, Yves Sagaert successfully defended his PhD in a public presentation at Ghent University! Yves’ PhD research has been on: tactical sales forecasting with external leading indicators. It has been a pleasure to work with Yves over the past years! During his PhD he published two papers, with more currently under review: Sagaert, Y.R., Aghezzaf,… Read More »
My new R package nnfor is available on CRAN. This collects the various neural network functions that appeared in TStools. See this post for demo of these functions. In summary the package includes: Automatic, semi-automatic or fully manual specification of MLP neural networks for time series modelling, that helps in specifying inputs with lags of the… Read More »
I recently got my hands on a physical copy of my new book: Principles of Business Forecasting (2nd edition). Ord, K., Fildes, R. and Kourentzes, N., 2017. Principles of business forecasting. 2nd ed. Wessex Press Publishing Co. I was invited by Keith Ord and Robert Fildes to join them in writing the much-revised 2nd edition… Read More »
I recently presented at the OR59 conference my views and current work (with colleagues) on uncertainty in predictive modelling. I think this is a topic that deserves quite a bit of research attention, as it has substnatial implications for estimation, model selection and eventually decision making. The talk has three parts: Argue (as others before… Read More »
N. Kourentzes, D. Li and A.K. Strauss, 2017. Journal of Revenue & Pricing Management.
Last February Facebook open sourced its Prophet forecasting tool. Since, it had appeared in quite a few discussions online. A good thing about Prophet is that it one can use it very easily through R (and Python). This gave me the opportunity to benchmark it against some more standard – and not! – forecasting models… Read More »
Temporal Hierarchies In the previous post we saw how the Multiple Aggregation Prediction Algortihm (MAPA) implements the ideas of MTA. We also saw that it has some limitations, particularly requiring splitting forecasts into subcomponents (level, trend and seasonality). Although some forecasting methods provide such outputs naturally, for example Exponential Smoothing and Theta, others do not.… Read More »
This is joint work with Rickard Sandberg and looks at the implicit connections enforced by hierarchical time series forecasting, between the nodes of the hierarchy, contrasting them to VAR models that captures connections explicitly. Abstract The four major Scandinavian economies (Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway) have high workforce mobility and depending on market dynamics the… Read More »
This is joint work with Fotios Petropoulos and Kostantinos Nikolopoulos and discusses the performance of experts selecting forecasting models, against automatic statistical model selection, as well as providing guidelines how to maximise the benefits. This is very exciting research, demonstrating the both some limitations of statistical model selection (and avenues for new research), as well… Read More »
This is joint work with Devon K. Barrow and Bahman Rostami-Tabar and is an initial exploration of the benefits of using Multiple Temporal Aggregation, as implemented in MAPA for call centre forecasting. The preliminary results are encouraging. More details in the attached presentation. Abstract With thousands of call centres worldwide employing millions and serving billions… Read More »