# How confident are you? Assessing the uncertainty in forecasting

Introduction Some people think that the main idea of forecasting is in predicting the future as accurately as possible. I have bad news for them. The main idea of forecasting is in decreasing the uncertainty. Think about it: any event that we want to predict has some systematic components $$\mu_t$$, which could potentially be captured […]

# Are you sure you’re precise? Measuring accuracy of point forecasts

Two years ago I have written a post “Naughty APEs and the quest for the holy grail“, where I have discussed why percentage-based error measures (such as MPE, MAPE, sMAPE) are not good for the task of forecasting performance evaluation. However, it seems to me that I did not explain the topic to the full […]

# Comparing additive and multiplicative regressions using AIC in R

One of the basic things the students are taught in statistics classes is that the comparison of models using information criteria can only be done when the models have the same response variable. This means, for example, that when you have $$\log(y_t)$$ and calculate AIC, then this value is not comparable with AIC from a […]

# Naughty APEs and the quest for the holy grail

Today I want to tell you a story of naughty APEs and the quest for the holy grail in forecasting. The topic has already been known for a while in academia, but is widely ignored by practitioners. APE stands for Absolute Percentage Error and is one of the simplest error measures, which is supposed to […]

# True model

In the modern statistical literature there is a notion of “true model”, by which people usually mean some abstract mathematical model, presumably lying in the core of observed process. Roughly saying, it is implied that data we have has been generated by some big guy with a white beard sitting in mathematical clouds using some […]