Publications by Rob J Hyndman

Visit of Di Cook

12.08.2014

Next week, Professor Di Cook from Iowa State University is visiting my research group at Monash University. Di is a world leader in data visualization, and is especially well-known for her work on interactive graphics and the XGobi and GGobi software. See her book with Deb Swayne for details. For those wanting to hear her speak, read on. Resear...

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GEFCom 2014 energy forecasting competition is underway

17.08.2014

GEFCom 2014 is the most advanced energy forecasting competition ever organized, both in terms of the data involved, and in terms of the way the forecasts will be evaluated. So everyone interested in energy forecasting should head over to the competition webpage and start forecasting: www.gefcom.org. This time, the competition is hosted on CrowdA...

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Forecasting with R in WA

24.08.2014

On 23–25 September, I will be running a 3-day workshop in Perth on “Forecasting: principles and practice” mostly based on my book of the same name. Workshop participants will be assumed to be familiar with basic statistical tools such as multiple regression, but no knowledge of time series or forecasting will be assumed. Some prior experien...

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A new candidate for worst figure

31.08.2014

Today I read a paper that had been submitted to the IJF which included the following figure along with several similar plots. (Click for a larger version.) I haven’t seen anything this bad for a long time. In fact, I think I would find it very difficult to reproduce using R, or even Excel (which is particularly adept at bad graphics). A few ye...

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Resources for the FPP book

02.09.2014

The FPP resources page has recently been updated with several new additions including R code for all examples in the book. This was already available within each chapter, but the examples have been collected into one file per chapter to save copying and pasting the various code fragments. Slides from a course on Predictive Analytics from the Un...

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Generating quantile forecasts in R

07.09.2014

From today’s email: I have just finished reading a copy of ‘Forecasting:Principles and Practice’ and I have found the book really interesting. I have particularly enjoyed the case studies and focus on practical applications. After finishing the book I have joined a forecasting competition to put what I’ve learnt to the test. I do have a c...

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FPP now available as a downloadable e-book

20.09.2014

My forecasting textbook with George Athanasopoulos is already available online (for free), and in print via Amazon (for under $40). Now we have made it available as a downloadable e-book via Google Books (for $15.55). The Google Books version is identical to the print version on Amazon (apart from a few typos that have been fixed). To use the ...

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TBATS with regressors

05.10.2014

I’ve received a few emails about including regression variables (i.e., covariates) in TBATS models. As TBATS models are related to ETS models, tbats() is unlikely to ever include covariates as explained here. It won’t actually complain if you include an xreg argument, but it will ignore it. When I want to include covariates in a time series m...

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hts with regressors

19.10.2014

The hts package for R allows for forecasting hierarchical and grouped time series data. The idea is to generate forecasts for all series at all levels of aggregation without imposing the aggregation constraints, and then to reconcile the forecasts so they satisfy the aggregation constraints. (An introduction to reconciling hierarchical and groupe...

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Prediction intervals too narrow

21.10.2014

Almost all prediction intervals from time series models are too narrow. This is a well-known phenomenon and arises because they do not account for all sources of uncertainty. In my 2002 IJF paper, we measured the size of the problem by computing the actual coverage percentage of the prediction intervals on hold-out samples. We found that for ETS ...

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