A simple combination of univariate models

Fotios Petropoulos and I have participated last year in M4 competition. Our approach performed well, finishing as 6th in the competition. This paper in International Journal of Forecasting explains what we used in our approach and why. Here’s the abstract: This paper describes the approach that we implemented for producing the point forecasts and prediction … Read more

State space ARIMA for supply-chain forecasting

John Boylan and I have been working lately on a paper, explaining the logic behind the ssarima() function from the smooth package. This paper has finally been accepted and published. Also, based on a modified version of the ssarima() function, I have developed a SSARIMA module for Smoothie software, developed by DemandWorks company. Both the … Read more

Conferences 2019

I usually prepare these types of posts at the end of the previous year, but this time I failed to do that earlier. As a result many deadlines for the abstract submissions have already passed. However, there are still several events that you can register for and attend in 2019: 5th April, CMAF Workshop on … Read more

Analytics with greybox

One of the reasons why I have started the greybox package is to use it for marketing research and marketing analytics. The common problem that I face, when working with these courses is analysing the data measured in different scales. While R handles numeric scales natively, the work with categorical is not satisfactory. Yes, I … Read more

OR60 presentation. Forecasting using exponential smoothing: the past, the present, the future

Robert Fildes asked me to prepare a review of exponential smoothing for OR60. I thought that it would be boring just to look in the past, so I decided to do past + present + future, adding a model that Nikos and I have started working on some time ago (GUM – Generalised Univariate Model). … Read more

“smooth” package for R. Intermittent state-space model. Part I. Introducing the model

UPDATE: Starting from smooth v 3.0.0, the occurrence part of the model has been removed from es() and other functions. The only one that implements this now is adam(). This post has been updated on 01 January 2021. UPDATE: Starting from smooth v 2.5.0, the model and the respective functions have changed. Now instead of … Read more

greybox 0.3.0 – what’s new

Three months have passed since the initial release of greybox on CRAN. I would not say that the package develops like crazy, but there have been some changes since May. Let’s have a look. We start by loading both greybox and smooth: library(greybox) library(smooth) Rolling Origin First of all, ro() function now has its own … Read more

International Symposium on Forecasting 2018

This year I have presented an extension of the research from ISF2017, called “Forecasting intermittent data with complex patterns”. This time we developed the model with “logistic probability”, which allows capturing complex patterns in demand occurrence part of the data. I also tried making the presentation more entertaining and easier to understand by a wider … Read more