Six questions for a forecaster-consultant

NHS has a helpful page with a set of questions you can ask your GP to ensure you receive the right treatment for your illness. Surprisingly, these questions can be applied in other fields as well. Here’s an example in applied forecasting, working with companies. I’m not going to go through all of them, I […]

5th IMA and OR Society Conference

It was a pleasure to attend the 5th IMA and OR Society Conference at Aston University, Birmingham, and to present my research with Anna Sroginis on model-based demand classification. A great crowd of people from universities across the UK, along with several esteemed international colleagues. The event was very well organised – thanks to Aris […]

Methods for the smooth functions in R

I have been asked recently by a colleague of mine how to extract the variance from a model estimated using adam() function from the smooth package in R. The problem was that that person started reading the source code of the forecast.adam() and got lost between the lines (this happens to me as well sometimes). […]

The role of M competitions in forecasting

If you are interested in forecasting, you might have heard of M-competitions. They played a pivotal role in developing forecasting principles, yet also sparked controversy. In this short post, I’ll briefly explain their historical significance and discuss their main findings. Before M-competitions, only few papers properly evaluated forecasting approaches. Statisticians assumed that if a model […]

Error Measures Flow Chart

In order to help master students of Lancaster University Managemen Science department, I have developed a flow chart, that acts as a basic guide on what error measures to use in different circumstances. This is not a complete and far from perfect flow chart, and it assumes that the decision maker knows what intermittent demand […]

Forecasting for the sake of forecasting

You probably have already noticed that we are in a pandemic of COVID-19 these days (breaking news: the UK has just announced a lockdown due to the virus). The number of news, memes and noise on the topic coming from around the world is astonishing! What is also astonishing is the number of posts on […]