UPDATE: I have also written a short post on “The role of M competitions in forecasting“, which gives historical perspective and a brief overview of the main findings of the previous competitions. Some of you might have noticed that the guidelines for the M5 competition have finally been released. Those of you who have previously […]
Applied forecasting
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 […]
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 […]
greybox package for R
I am delighted to announce a new package on CRAN. It is called “greybox”. I know, what my American friends will say, as soon as they see the name – they will claim that there is a typo, and that it should be “a” instead of “e”. But in fact no mistake was made – […]
smooth functions in 2017
Over the year 2017 the smooth package has grown from v1.6.0 to v2.3.1. Now it is much more mature and has more downloads. It even now has its own hex (thanks to Fotios Petropoulos): A lot of changes happened in 2017, and it is hard to mention all of them, but the major ones are: […]
“smooth” package for R. Common ground. Part I. Prediction intervals
UPDATE: Starting from v2.5.1 the parameter intervals has been renamed into interval for the consistency purposes with the other R functions. We have spent previous six posts discussing basics of es() function (underlying models and their implementation). Now it is time to move forward. Starting from this post we will discuss common parameters, shared by […]
“smooth” package for R. es() function. Part VI. Parameters optimisation
UPDATE: Starting from the v2.5.6 the C parameter has been renamed into B. This is now consistent across all the functions. Now that we looked into the basics of es() function, we can discuss how the optimisation mechanism works, how the parameters are restricted and what are the initials values for the parameters in the […]
Seminar and presentation at Bath University
Last week I have visited Bath University, where Dr. Fotios Petropoulos works. He organised a scientific seminar, where I could present my recent research on topic “One for all: forecasting intermittent and non-intermittent demand using one model“. The presentation was well received and rose several interesting questions from the participants of the seminar, which will […]
“smooth” package for R. es() function. Part V. Essential parameters
While the previous posts on es() function contained two parts: theory of ETS and then the implementation – this post will cover only the latter. We won’t discuss anything new, we will mainly look into several parameters that the exponential smoothing function has and what they allow us to do. We start with initialisation of […]
“smooth” package for R. es() function. Part IV. Model selection and combination of forecasts
Mixed models In the previous posts we have discussed pure additive and pure multiplicative exponential smoothing models. The next logical step would be to discuss mixed models, where some components have additive and the others have multiplicative nature. But we won’t spend much time on them because I personally think that they do not make […]