Publications by Rob J Hyndman
Fitting models to short time series
Following my post on fitting models to long time series, I thought I’d tackle the opposite problem, which is more common in business environments. I often get asked how few data points can be used to fit a time series model. As with almost all sample size questions, there is no easy answer. It depends on the number of model parameters to be e...
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Forecasting weekly data
This is another situation where Fourier terms are useful for handling the seasonality. Not only is the seasonal period rather long, it is non-integer (averaging 365.25/7 = 52.18). So ARIMA and ETS models do not tend to give good results, even with a period of 52 as an approximation. Regression with ARIMA errors The simplest approach is a regress...
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Using old versions of R packages
I received this email yesterday: I have been using your ‘forecast’ package for more than a year now. I was on R version 2.15 until last week, but I am having issues with lubridate package, hence decided to update R version to R 3.0.1. In our organization even getting an open source application require us to go through a whole lot of approval...
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Unit root tests and ARIMA models
An email I received today: I have a small problem. I have a time series called x : – If I use the default values of auto.arima(x), the best model is an ARIMA(1,0,0) – However, I tried the function ndiffs(x, test=“adf”) and ndiffs(x, test=“kpss”) as the KPSS test seems to be the default value, and the number of difference is 0 for the...
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Testing for trend in ARIMA models
Today’s email brought this one: I was wondering if I could get your opinion on a particular problem that I have run into during the reviewing process of an article. Basically, I have an analysis where I am looking at a couple of time-series and I wanted to know if, over time there was an upward trend in the series. Inspection of the raw data s...
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Cover of my forecasting textbook
We now have a cover for the print version of my forecasting book with George Athanasopoulos. It should be on Amazon in a couple of weeks. The book is also freely available online. This is a variation of the most popular one in the poll conducted a month or two ago. The cover was produced by Scarlett Rugers who I can happily recommend to anyone w...
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Job at Center for Open Science
This looks like an interesting job. Dear Dr. Hyndman, I write from the Center for Open Science, a non-profit organization based in Charlottesville, Virginia in the United States, which is dedicated to improving the alignment between scientific values and scientific practices. We are dedicated to open source and open science. We are reaching out ...
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My forecasting book now on Amazon
For all those people asking me how to obtain a print version of my book “Forecasting: principles and practice” with George Athanasopoulos, you now can. Order on Amazon.com Order on Amazon.co.uk Order on Amazon.fr The online book will continue to be freely available. The print version of the book is intended to help fund the development of th...
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Errors on percentage errors
The MAPE (mean absolute percentage error) is a popular measure for forecast accuracy and is defined as where denotes an observation and denotes its forecast, and the mean is taken over . Armstrong (1985, p.348) was the first (to my knowledge) to point out the asymmetry of the MAPE saying that “it has a bias favoring estimates that are below ...
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Seven forecasting blogs
There are several other blogs on forecasting that readers might be interested in. Here are seven worth following: No Hesitations by Francis Diebold (Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania). Diebold needs no introduction to forecasters. He primarily covers forecasting in economics and finance, but also xkcd cartoons, graphics, resea...
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