Smooth forecasting with the smooth package in R

Authors: Ivan Svetunkov Abstract: There are many forecasting related packages in R with varied popularity, the most famous of all being forecast, which implements several important forecasting approaches, such as ARIMA, ETS, TBATS and others. However, the main issue with the existing functionality is the lack of flexibility for research purposes, when it comes to […]

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, […]