Complex Exponential Smoothing

Authors: Ivan Svetunkov, Nikolaos Kourentzes, Keith Ord. Journal: Naval Research Logistics Abstract: Exponential smoothing has been one of the most popular forecasting methods used to support various decisions in organisations, in activities such as inventory management, scheduling, revenue management and other areas. Although its relative simplicity and transparency have made it very attractive for research […]

ISF2022: How to make ETS work with ARIMA

This time ISF took place in Oxford. I acted as a programme chair of the event and was quite busy with schedule and some other minor organisational things, but I still found time to present something new. Specifically, I talked about one specific part of ADAM, the part implementing ETS+ARIMA. The idea is that the […]

A New Taxonomy for Vector Exponential Smoothing and Its Application to Seasonal Time Series

Authors: Ivan Svetunkov, Huijing Chen, John E. Boylan. Journal: European Journal of Operational Research Abstract: In short-term demand forecasting, it is often difficult to estimate seasonality accurately, owing to short data histories. However, companies usually have multiple products with similar seasonal demand patterns. A possible solution, in this case, is to use the components of […]

Vector Exponential Smoothing with PIC restrictions

About the paper. Introduction When you follow academics on social media, you typically see many success stories. This person published a paper in Management Science; another one published in EJOR; your colleague from a different university created a great package; and there is also an academic who is ten years younger than you and has […]

Introducing scale model in greybox

At the end of June 2021, I released the greybox package version 1.0.0. This was a major release, introducing new functionality, but I did not have time to write a separate post about it because of the teaching and lack of free time. Finally, Christmas has arrived, and I could spend several hours preparing the […]

Statistical tests flowchart

In Lancaster University, I teach the module called “Statistics and Descriptive Analytics”, which is compulsory for master students of the programme “Business Analytics“. This year, the module has been delivered by Alisa Yusupova and me, and I have prepared a flowchart that should (hopefully) help students decide, which of the statistical tests to use in […]

An Integrated Method for Estimation and Optimisation

My PhD student, Congzheng Liu (co-supervised with Adam Letchford) has written a paper, entitled “Newsvendor Problems: An Integrated Method for Estimation and Optimisation“. This paper has recently been published in EJOR. In this paper we build upon the existing Ban & Rudin (2019) approach for newsvendor problem, showing that in case of the linear model, […]

Stochastic coherency in forecast reconciliation

My student (co-supervised with Nikos Kourentzes), Kandrika F. Pritularga has written a paper on “Stochastic coherency in forecast reconciliation”, which has been recently published in International Journal of Production Economics (here it is). This paper contributes to the field of hierarchical forecasting, the main issue of which is that the forecasts produced on different levels […]

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 […]