Chapter 18 Forecasting with ADAM
Finally, we come to the technicalities of producing forecasts using ADAM. We have already discussed how conditional expectations can be generated from some of the models (e.g. Sections 5.3, 6.3, 9.2.1, 10.2, and 10.3.1), but we have not discussed this in necessary detail. Furthermore, as discussed in Section 1.1, forecasts should align with specific decisions, but we have not discussed how to do that.
In this chapter, we start with an explanation of how the simulation paths can be generated to obtain moments and quantiles in cases when they are not available analytically (Section 18.1). We then discuss the principles behind calculating the conditional moments from ADAM (including ETS, ARIMA, Regression, and their combinations, Section 18.2). After that we move to various methods for prediction interval construction, starting from the basic parametric and ending with empirical ones and those that take the uncertainty of parameters into account (building upon Chapter 16). Finally, we discuss prediction intervals for the intermittent state space model (Chapter 13), one-sided intervals, and cumulative forecasts over the forecast horizon, which is useful in practice, especially when inventory decisions need to be made. We also discuss the confidence interval for the conditional mean, which is not as important as the other topics mentioned above but is still useful in some contexts.