“My amazing forecasting method has a lower MASE than any other method!” You’ve probably seen claims like this on social media or in papers. But have you ever thought about what it really means? Many forecasting experiments come to applying several approaches to a dataset, calculating error measures for each method per time series and … Read more
Authors: Ivan Svetunkov, John E. Boylan Journal: IMA Journal of Management Mathematics Abstract: Exponential smoothing in state space form (ETS) is a popular forecasting technique, widely used in research and practice. While the additive error ETS models have been well studied, the multiplicative error ones have received much less attention in forecasting literature. Still, these … Read more
On 15th December 2023, I presented in a CMAF Friday Forecasting Talks webinar on the topic of “Why you should care about exponential smoothing”. The motivation was to give a fresh view on the good old model and show how it started, how it evolved over time and how it can be improved. With this … Read more
Authors: Ivan Svetunkov, John E. Boylan Journal: International Journal of Production Economics Abstract: Inventory decisions relating to items that are demanded intermittently are particularly challenging. Decisions relating to termination of sales of product often rely on point estimates of the mean demand, whereas replenishment decisions depend on quantiles from interval estimates. It is in this … Read more
The paper Back in 2020, when we were all siting in the COVID lockdown, I had a call with Bahman Rostami-Tabar to discuss one of our projects. He told me that he had an hourly data of an Emergency Department from a hospital in Wales, and suggested writing a paper for a healthcare audience to … Read more
Authors: Bahman Rostami-Tabar, Jethro Browell, Ivan Svetunkov Journal: Health Systems Abstract: An accurate forecast of Emergency Department (ED) arrivals by an hour of the day is critical to meet patients’ demand. It enables planners to match ED staff to the number of arrivals, redeploy staff, and reconfigure units. In this study, we develop a model … Read more
smooth package has reached version 3.2.0 and is now on CRAN. While the version change from 3.1.7 to 3.2.0 looks small, this has introduced several substantial changes and represents a first step in moving to the new C++ code in the core of the functions. In this short post, I will outline the main new … Read more
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 … Read more
After working on this for more than a year, I have finally prepared the first draft of my online monograph “Forecasting and Analytics with ADAM“. This is a monograph on the model that unites ETS, ARIMA and regression and introduces advanced features in univariate modelling, including: ETS in a new State Space form; ARIMA in … Read more
This year International Symposium on Forecasting was held online, although Centre for Marketing Analytics and Forecasting of Lancaster University had their own hub, where we would come and watch presentations together and even present to the others. I presented on the topic of Multiplicative ETS, based on this chapter of the ADAM textbook and on … Read more