Stay on top of all the events, news and speakers at the 35th International Symposium on Forecasting, taking place now in Riverside, California. twitter: @foresightiif, #ISFConf2015, instagram: @iifforesight and facebook!
View the full program and learn more about the Keynote Speakers: Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, Dimitris Politis, UC San Diego and Joel Cohen, Columbia University, as well as cutting edge research in the field of forecasting.
The IIF is saddened to report the news of the passing of Robert Goodrich, an IIF Fellow and leader in the field of forecasting. Bob was the President of Business Forecast Systems Inc., USA. He was recognized for his sustained development of state of the art forecasting software that both reflects current research developments and its major impact on forecasting practice.
Robert Lindner Goodrich, of Hancock, Washington, N.H. and Sanibel, Fla. died on Jun. 27 in Fort Myers, Fla. with his loving wife and daughters by his side. He was 79 years old. –
See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/ledgertranscript/obituary.aspx?pid=175201878#sthash.WMvztxMT.dpuf
Forecasting – Geoff Allen and Robert Fildes have recently contributed an on-line bibliography in forecasting for Oxford University Press: Fildes, R. & Allen, P.G. (2015), in Oxford Bibliographies in Management. Ed. R. Griffin. New York: Oxford University Press.
The history of forecasting goes back at least as far as the Oracle at Delphi in Greece. Stripped of its mystique, this was what we now refer to as “unaided judgment,” the only forecasting method available for centuries. Read more …
New! If you would like to submit a *forecasting-related conference to be included on our website, click here. All submissions will be reviewed prior to posting.…
We are now accepting abstracts for submission to the 36th International Symposium on Forecasting. The ISF Program Committee looks forward to receiving abstracts and hearing inventive presentations that demonstrate again that the annual forecasting symposium is the only forum where the latest forecasting problems are confronted by new solutions.
For more information and to submit an abstract, click here.
Xia (Summer) Meng is a PhD candidate from University of Bath and together with her supervisors (Professor Paul Goodwin and Dr Sheik Meeran) is running an experiment to investigate the relationship between the accuracy of judgmental forecasting and risk-taking behaviour. They will address two questions:
If you would like to help Summer by participating in her experiment, you can find more details here: http://www.forsoc.net/2015/10/19/forecasting-and-risk-taking/
Check out Foresight Editor Len Tashman’s conversation with Maggie Miller on the do’s and don’t’s of forecasting (and what’s coming down the road in the field) at the SAS Serious Analytics conference.
…
The ISF Program Committee invites you to submit abstracts related to the theory and practice of forecasting. The deadline date for abstracts is 16 March 2016. Papers on all aspects of forecasting are welcome. To learn more about ISF 2016, visit our website.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Pam Stroud, Business Director
International Institute of Forecasters
+1.781.234.4077
isf@forecasters.org
www.forecasters.org
36th International Symposium on Forecasting, June 19-22, 2016 in Santander, Spain
Boston, MA, March 2, 2016 – Integrating academic research into practical applications is one of the hallmarks of the annual International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF) being held this year, June 19 – 22 in Santander, Spain. The ISF draws the world’s top forecasting professionals and researchers, presenters and participants, to learn about and discuss cutting-edge forecasting trends.
The premiere international conference on forecasting, the ISF encompasses a broad range of forecasting sectors. This year’s event includes sessions on climate predictability, forecasting electricity demand, prediction of business cycles in real time, financial market volatility, forecast optimality, early warning signals, tourism forecasting, information technology trends, macroeconomic trends and history of prediction science, among many others.
“The Symposium provides a platform for leading forecasting professionals to reveal their insights into the field. With a stimulating scientific program, plenty of networking opportunities, and a fun social program, ISF 2016 will be a memorable event. The City of Santander warmly welcomes our participants and extends an invitation to explore the beauty of the northern, Cantabria region of Spain,” says Antonio Garcia-Ferrer, General Chair of ISF 2016, and Professor of Econometrics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.
For the second time, the symposium will present the Arnold Zellner Memorial Keynote Address in honor of the late professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. Professor Edward Leamer, professor at University of California, Los Angeles, has been given the honor of delivering the address for ISF 2016.
Other notable speakers at this year’s symposium include Greg Allenby, The Ohio State University; Todd Clark, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland; José Duato, Polytechnic University of Valencia; Robert Fildes, Lancaster University; Henrik Madsen, Technical University of Denmark; and, Adrian Raftery, University of Washington.
New in 2016: Forecasting in Practice. The editors of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting have created The Foresight Practitioner Track – a full day program designed to meet the professional development needs of business forecasting practitioners. Notable speakers from industry and academia will present this unique program. Program details are available at https://forecasters.org/isf/program/speakers/#practitioner.
Institutional and private event sponsors include Elsevier, SAS, Leaseplan, Cantabria Government, Fundacion Ramon Areces, Credito y Caucion, Santander City Hall and the Universidad Internacional Menendez y Pelayo. For more information on sponsorship opportunities, contact the IIF directly (see contact information below).
Research conducted through the SAS Forecasting Research Grant program will also be presented at this year’s conference. Awarded by the IIF with support from SAS, grants totaling $10,000 are given annually for research that advances the field of forecasting. The program is now in its fourteenth year.
Individuals and organizations are invited to submit abstracts for the conference through March 16. Discounted early registration rates for the ISF conference are available through May 15 for both IIF members and non-members. Special student rates are also available. Access online registration at http://forecasters.org/isf.
For more information about the 2016 ISF, see forecasters.org/ISF2016 or contact Pam Stroud, IIF Business Director at isf@forecasters.org, +1.781.234.4077
About the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF) – The International Institute of Forecasters, founded in 1981, is the preeminent organization for forecasting scholars and practitioners across the globe. The IIF is widely recognized for promoting best practices and advancing the field of forecasting through its workshops, its annual International Symposium on Forecasting, and its two publications, The International Journal of Forecasting and its journal for forecasting practitioner’s Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting.
Supply Chain Forecasting | European Journal of Operational Research
In this paper the authors argue that academic research in Supply Chain Forecasting (SCF) has tended to neglect some issues that are important in practice. Correspondingly, in areas of practical relevance, sound theoretical developments have rarely been translated into operational solutions or integrated in state-of-the-art decision support systems. The paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature, organised around some key supply chain dimensions, aiming at bridging the gap between theory and practice in the existing knowledge base in SCF.
The most promising approaches are highlighted and their integration in forecasting support systems is discussed. Current challenges are addressed both from a research and practitioner perspective and the paper provides a research and application agenda for further work in this area. Interestingly, it also makes a methodological contribution (in the preparation of review papers) in that the forecasting community was consulted (through a survey) when preparing the article and deciding on its content (rather than solely relying, as is common, upon the authors’ background and expertise).
The full bibliographical details of the paper are as follows: Syntetos, A.A., Babai, M.Z., Boylan, J.E., Kolassa, S. and Nikolopoulos, K. (2016) Supply Chain Forecasting: Theory, Practice, their Gap and the Future. European Journal of Operational Research, 252 (1), 1-26. For any comments or suggestions please contact Aris Syntetos.
IMA Journal of Management Mathematics
Edited by Professor Aris Syntetos, and compiled of seven highly cited articles covering forecasting research, explore the new virtual issue ‘Forecasting in Management Science’. The first in a series of virtual issues to be published by the IMA Journal of Management Mathematics, this issue aims to stimulate dialogue between specialist forecasting researchers and more generalist management science researchers.
All articles are freely downloadable until June 2016.
On the effect of non-optimal forecasting methods on supply chain downstream demand
M. M. Ali and J. E. Boylan
New forecasting insights on the bullwhip effect in a supply chain
M. Najafi and R. Zanjirani Farahani
Adjusting supply chain forecasts for short-term temperature estimates: a case study in a Brewing company
K. Nikolopoulos and R. Fildes
A systemic view of the ADIDA framework
G. P. Spithourakis, F. Petropoulos, K. Nikolopoulos, and V. Assimakopoulos
The use of analogies in forecasting the annual sales of new electronics products
P. Goodwin, K. Dyussekeneva, and S. Meeran
Fathoming the theta method for a unit root process
D. Thomakos and K. Nikolopoulos
The IMA Journal of Management Mathematics (IMAMAN), publishes mathematical or, more broadly, quantitative research of the highest quality, impact and relevance that can be directly utilized or have demonstrable potential to be employed by managers in profit, not-for-profit, third party and governmental/public organizations to improve their practices.
(This post is syndicated from Hyndsight)
The latest issue of the IJF is a bumper issue with over 500 pages of forecasting insights.
The GEFCom2014 papers are included in a special section on probabilistic energy forecasting, guest edited by Tao Hong and Pierre Pinson. This is a major milestone in energy forecasting research with the focus on probabilistic forecasting and forecast evaluation done using a quantile scoring method. Only a few years ago I was having to explain to energy professionals why you couldn’t use a MAPE to evaluate a percentile forecast. With this special section, we now have a tutorial review on probabilistic electric load forecasting by Tao Hong and Shu Fan, which should help everyone get up to speed with current forecasting approaches, evaluation methods and common misunderstandings. The section also contains a large number of very high quality articles showing how to do state-of-the-art density forecasting for electricity load, electricity price, solar and wind power. Moreover, we have some benchmarks on publicly available data sets so future researchers can easily compare their methods against these published results.
In addition to the special section on probabilistic energy forecasting, there is an invited review paper on call centre forecasting by Ibrahim, Ye, L’Ecuyer and Shen. This is an important area in practice, and this paper provides a helpful review of the literature, a summary of the key issues in building good models, and suggests some possible future research directions.
There is also an invited paper from Blasques, Koopman, Łasak and Lucas on “In-sample confidence bands and out-of-sample forecast bands for time-varying parameters in observation-driven models” with some great discussion from Catherine Forbes and Pierre Perron. This was the subject of Siem Jan Koopman’s ISF talk in 2014.
Finally, there are 18 regular contributed papers, more than we normally publish in a whole issue, on topics ranging from forecasting excess stock returns to demographics of households, from forecasting food prices, to evaluating forecasts of counts and intermittent demand. Check them all out on ScienceDirect.
Lancaster Centre for Forecasting hosted the 19th IIF Workshop on Supply Chain Forecasting for Operations on 28th and 29th of June, jointly sponsored by the IIF and the software company SAS. The event attracted an international gathering of researchers and practitioners with presentations covering supply chain risk mitigation, temporal and cross-sectional aggregation, structural models, forecast integration, uncertainty and evaluation.
The presentation slides are available at http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/scfo/proceedings/
There was a single stream and each speaker was allocated 35 minutes, including a generous time for comments from a discussant and questions from participants. The feedback on the workshop was very positive, with requests to organise such events more often.
BREXIT: Risk, Uncertainty and Ambiguity | An Interview with Prof. Roy Batchelor, 6 July 2016
Read on for an interview with Professor Roy Batchelor, Cass Business School, and an IIF Director:
Q. Professor Batchelor, your subject area is forecasting, with a focus on financial markets. There seems to have been a major failure to forecast the Brexit vote, and now financial markets in the UK are in turmoil. What is going on?
A. It is true that once again the opinion polls have let us down. More interestingly the betting markets – which are normally more reliable since people are putting their own money on the line – appear also to have let us down.
There has been an inquest into this, and it seems that the number of bets for Remain and Leave were roughly equal, but – consistent with their very different voter demographics – the size of the typical Remain bet was about five times the size of the typical Leave bet. So the bookies had to set odds of 4 to 1 against Brexit. But all this meant was that Leave supporters had less money to burn.2, 3
However, even if the vote had been predicted, we would still see a lot of negative sentiment about the future, and volatility in the stock market. The alternative to EU membership was never spelt out. We are suddenly in a world of unquantifiable uncertainty, rather than measureable risk.
To read the full interview, click here.
For the fourteenth year, the IIF, in collaboration and with financial support from SAS®, is proud to announce financial support for research on how to improve forecasting methods and business forecasting practice. The awards for the 2016-2017 year will be (2) $5,000 grants; in Business Applications and Methodology. The deadline for applications is September 30, 2016.
For more information and to apply: forecasters.org/activities/grants-and-research-awards/
Two exciting opportunities are currently available within Cardiff Business School to conduct cutting-edge implementable research in the area of circular economy. This 2-year project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, UK, EP/P008925, Resilient Remanufacturing Networks: Forecasting, Informatics and Holons) and it aims at advancing knowledge and making an impact in real world practices in the area of forecasting and inventory / production control in a remanufacturing context. The project benefits from the support of three industrial collaborators as well as the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). The successful candidates will be part of the Logistics and Operations Management (LOM) section of the School and benefit from exposure to an academic community that equally emphasises theoretical rigour and practical implementation. They will also benefit from collaborative work within the newly formed Logistics Research Centre, funded by Panalpina World Transport Ltd, and a currently ongoing knowledge transfer partnership (KTP) with a re-manufacturer in North Wales.
Please contact Professor Aris Syntetos with all inquiries.
Forecasting & Quantification Officer position in Washington, DC Metro Area
We’re Population Services International (PSI), the world’s leading non-profit social marketing organization. We work to make it easier for people in the developing world to lead healthier lives and plan the families they desire by marketing affordable products and services that range from mosquito nets to contraceptives to HIV testing. The Global Health Supply Chain (GH Rx) project will be the primary vehicle through which USAID will 1) procure and provide health commodities, 2) provide technical assistance to improve partner countries’ management of the supply chain, and 3) collaborate with key international stakeholders to support global health initiatives. We are looking for a Forecasting & Quantification Officer who will serve as the main point for systems strengthening issues related to HIV/AIDS, malaria, or population and reproductive health. The Forecasting and Quantification Officer will support the GH Rx project on systematic forecasting various health commodities. Please visit: www.psi.org/careers for more information.
The latest issue of the International Journal of Forecasting (October–December 2016) is now available! Here is just a sampling of the articles in this issue:
A comparison of AdaBoost algorithms for time series forecast combination Devon K. Barrow, Sven F. Crone
What predicts US recessions? Weiling Liu, Emanuel Moench
The forecastability quotient reconsidered Everette Shaw Gardner Jr., Yavuz Acar
Testing the historic tracking of climate models Michael Beenstock, Yaniv Reingewertz, Nathan Paldor
A simple model for now-casting volatility series Jörg Breitung, Christian M. Hafner
IMA Journal of Management Mathematics
Edited by Professor Aris Syntetos, and compiled of seven highly cited articles covering forecasting research, explore the new virtual issue ‘Forecasting in Management Science’. The first in a series of virtual issues to be published by the IMA Journal of Management Mathematics, this issue aims to stimulate dialogue between specialist forecasting researchers and more generalist management science researchers.
All articles are freely downloadable until June 2016.
On the effect of non-optimal forecasting methods on supply chain downstream demand
M. M. Ali and J. E. Boylan
New forecasting insights on the bullwhip effect in a supply chain
M. Najafi and R. Zanjirani Farahani
Adjusting supply chain forecasts for short-term temperature estimates: a case study in a Brewing company
K. Nikolopoulos and R. Fildes
A systemic view of the ADIDA framework
G. P. Spithourakis, F. Petropoulos, K. Nikolopoulos, and V. Assimakopoulos
The use of analogies in forecasting the annual sales of new electronics products
P. Goodwin, K. Dyussekeneva, and S. Meeran
Fathoming the theta method for a unit root process
D. Thomakos and K. Nikolopoulos
The IMA Journal of Management Mathematics (IMAMAN), publishes mathematical or, more broadly, quantitative research of the highest quality, impact and relevance that can be directly utilized or have demonstrable potential to be employed by managers in profit, not-for-profit, third party and governmental/public organizations to improve their practices.
(This post is syndicated from Hyndsight)
The latest issue of the IJF is a bumper issue with over 500 pages of forecasting insights.
The GEFCom2014 papers are included in a special section on probabilistic energy forecasting, guest edited by Tao Hong and Pierre Pinson. This is a major milestone in energy forecasting research with the focus on probabilistic forecasting and forecast evaluation done using a quantile scoring method. Only a few years ago I was having to explain to energy professionals why you couldn’t use a MAPE to evaluate a percentile forecast. With this special section, we now have a tutorial review on probabilistic electric load forecasting by Tao Hong and Shu Fan, which should help everyone get up to speed with current forecasting approaches, evaluation methods and common misunderstandings. The section also contains a large number of very high quality articles showing how to do state-of-the-art density forecasting for electricity load, electricity price, solar and wind power. Moreover, we have some benchmarks on publicly available data sets so future researchers can easily compare their methods against these published results.
In addition to the special section on probabilistic energy forecasting, there is an invited review paper on call centre forecasting by Ibrahim, Ye, L’Ecuyer and Shen. This is an important area in practice, and this paper provides a helpful review of the literature, a summary of the key issues in building good models, and suggests some possible future research directions.
There is also an invited paper from Blasques, Koopman, Łasak and Lucas on “In-sample confidence bands and out-of-sample forecast bands for time-varying parameters in observation-driven models” with some great discussion from Catherine Forbes and Pierre Perron. This was the subject of Siem Jan Koopman’s ISF talk in 2014.
Finally, there are 18 regular contributed papers, more than we normally publish in a whole issue, on topics ranging from forecasting excess stock returns to demographics of households, from forecasting food prices, to evaluating forecasts of counts and intermittent demand. Check them all out on ScienceDirect.
