Comparison of two non‐parametric models for daily traffic forecasting in Hong Kong

The most up‐to‐date annual average daily traffic (AADT) is always required for transport model development and calibration. However, the current‐year AADT data are not always available. The short‐term traffic flow forecasting models can be used to predict the traffic flows for the current year. In this paper, two non‐parametric models, non‐parametric regression (NPR) and Gaussian maximum likelihood (GML), are chosen for short‐term traffic forecasting based on historical data collected for the annual traffic census (ATC) in Hong Kong. These models are adapted as they are more flexible and efficient in forecasting the daily vehicular flows in the Hong Kong ATC core stations (in total of 87 stations). The daily vehicular flows predicted by these models are then used to calculate the AADT of the current year, 1999. The overall prediction and comparison results show that the NPR model produces better forecasts than the GML model using the ATC data in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley _ Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting UK industrial production over the business cycle

This paper examines the information available through leading indicators for modelling and forecasting the UK quarterly index of production. Both linear and non‐linear specifications are examined, with the latter being of the Markov‐switching type as used in many recent business cycle applications. The Markov‐switching models perform relatively poorly in forecasting the 1990s production recession, but a three‐indicator linear specification does well. The leading indicator variables in this latter model include a short‐term interest rate, the stock market dividend yield and the optimism balance from the quarterly CBI survey. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis of the relationship between LSTM network traffic flow prediction performance and statistical characteristics of standard and nonstandard data

The effectiveness of road traffic control systems can be increased with the help of a model that can accurately predict short-term traffic flow. Therefore, the performance of the preferred approach to develop a prediction model should be evaluated with data sets with different statistical characteristics. Thus a correlation can be established between the statistical properties of the data set and the model performance. The determination of this relationship will assist experts in choosing the appropriate approach to develop a high-performance short-term traffic flow forecasting model. The main purpose of this study is to reveal the relationship between the long short-term memory network (LSTM) approach's short-term traffic flow prediction performance and the statistical properties of the data set used to develop the LSTM model. In order to reveal these relationships, two different traffic prediction models with LSTM and nonlinear autoregressive (NAR) approaches were created using different data sets, and statistical analyses were performed. In addition, these analyses were repeated for nonstandardized traffic data indicating unusual fluctuations in traffic flow. As a result of the analyses, LSTM and NAR model performances were found to be highly correlated with the kurtosis and skewness changes of the data sets used to train and test these models. On the other hand, it was found that the difference of mean and skewness values of training and test sets had a significant effect on model performance in the prediction of nonstandard traffic flow samples.     

Comparing the DSGE model with the factor model: an out‐of‐sample forecasting experiment

In this paper, we put dynamic stochastic general equilibrium DSGE forecasts in competition with factor forecasts. We focus on these two models since they represent nicely the two opposing forecasting philosophies. The DSGE model on the one hand has a strong theoretical economic background; the factor model on the other hand is mainly data‐driven. We show that incorporating a large information set using factor analysis can indeed improve the short‐horizon predictive ability, as claimed by many researchers. The micro‐founded DSGE model can provide reasonable forecasts for US inflation, especially with growing forecast horizons. To a certain extent, our results are consistent with the prevailing view that simple time series models should be used in short‐horizon forecasting and structural models should be used in long‐horizon forecasting. Our paper compares both state‐of‐the‐art data‐driven and theory‐based modelling in a rigorous manner. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting intraday S&P 500 index returns: A functional time series approach

Financial data often take the form of a collection of curves that can be observed sequentially over time; for example, intraday stock price curves and intraday volatility curves. These curves can be viewed as a time series of functions that can be observed on equally spaced and dense grids. Owing to the so‐called curse of dimensionality, the nature of high‐dimensional data poses challenges from a statistical perspective; however, it also provides opportunities to analyze a rich source of information, so that the dynamic changes of short time intervals can be better understood. In this paper, we consider forecasting a time series of functions and propose a number of statistical methods that can be used to forecast 1‐day‐ahead intraday stock returns. As we sequentially observe new data, we also consider the use of dynamic updating in updating point and interval forecasts for achieving improved accuracy. The forecasting methods were validated through an empirical study of 5‐minute intraday S&P 500 index returns.     

Neural model identification,variable selection and model adequacy

In recent years an impressive array of publications has appeared claiming considerable successes of neural networks in modelling financial data but sceptical practitioners and statisticians are still raising the question of whether neural networks really are ‘a major breakthrough or just a passing fad’. A major reason for this is the lack of procedures for performing tests for misspecified models, and tests of statistical significance for the various parameters that have been estimated, which makes it difficult to assess the model's significance and the possibility that any short‐term successes that are reported might be due to ‘data mining’. In this paper we describe a methodology for neural model identification which facilitates hypothesis testing at two levels: model adequacy and variable significance. The methodology includes a model selection procedure to produce consistent estimators, a variable selection procedure based on statistical significance and a model adequacy procedure based on residuals analysis. We propose a novel, computationally efficient scheme for estimating sampling variability of arbitrarily complex statistics for neural models and apply it to variable selection. The approach is based on sampling from the asymptotic distribution of the neural model's parameters (‘parametric sampling’). Controlled simulations are used for the analysis and evaluation of our model identification methodology. A case study in tactical asset allocation is used to demonstrate how the methodology can be applied to real‐life problems in a way analogous to stepwise forward regression analysis. Neural models are contrasted to multiple linear regression. The results indicate the presence of non‐linear relationships in modelling the equity premium. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Term premia and the maturity composition of the Federal debt: new evidence from the term structure of interest rates

This paper models bond term premia empirically in terms of the maturity composition of the federal debt and other observable economic variables in a time‐varying framework with potential regime shifts. We present regression and out‐of sample forecasting results demonstrating that information on the age composition of the Federal debt is useful for forecasting term premia. We show that the multiprocess mixture model, a multi‐state time‐varying parameter model, outperforms the commonly used GARCH model in out‐of‐sample forecasts of term premia. The results underscore the importance of modelling term premia, as a function of economic variables rather than just as a function of asset covariances as in the conditional heteroscedasticity models. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting the Antwerp maritime traffic flows using transformations and intervention models

This article uses univariate time-series models with data transformations and intervention models to forecast the volumes of twenty-two maritime traffic flows in the port of Antwerp which are expressed in tonnes. The models obtained produce forecasts that are a substantial improvement over those obtained with unadjusted data. The models also provide useful insight into the behaviour of maritime traffic flows during the period 1971–82.     

Short‐term forecasting of GDP using large datasets: a pseudo real‐time forecast evaluation exercise

This paper performs a large‐scale forecast evaluation exercise to assess the performance of different models for the short‐term forecasting of GDP, resorting to large datasets from ten European countries. Several versions of factor models are considered and cross‐country evidence is provided. The forecasting exercise is performed in a simulated real‐time context, which takes account of publication lags in the individual series. In general, we find that factor models perform best and models that exploit monthly information outperform models that use purely quarterly data. However, the improvement over the simpler, quarterly models remains contained. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unemployment variation over the business cycles: a comparison of forecasting models

Asymmetry has been well documented in the business cycle literature. The asymmetric business cycle suggests that major macroeconomic series, such as a country's unemployment rate, are non‐linear and, therefore, the use of linear models to explain their behaviour and forecast their future values may not be appropriate. Many researchers have focused on providing evidence for the non‐linearity in the unemployment series. Only recently have there been some developments in applying non‐linear models to estimate and forecast unemployment rates. A major concern of non‐linear modelling is the model specification problem; it is very hard to test all possible non‐linear specifications, and to select the most appropriate specification for a particular model. Artificial neural network (ANN) models provide a solution to the difficulty of forecasting unemployment over the asymmetric business cycle. ANN models are non‐linear, do not rely upon the classical regression assumptions, are capable of learning the structure of all kinds of patterns in a data set with a specified degree of accuracy, and can then use this structure to forecast future values of the data. In this paper, we apply two ANN models, a back‐propagation model and a generalized regression neural network model to estimate and forecast post‐war aggregate unemployment rates in the USA, Canada, UK, France and Japan. We compare the out‐of‐sample forecast results obtained by the ANN models with those obtained by several linear and non‐linear times series models currently used in the literature. It is shown that the artificial neural network models are able to forecast the unemployment series as well as, and in some cases better than, the other univariate econometrics time series models in our test. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An ensemble of LSTM neural networks for high‐frequency stock market classification

We propose an ensemble of long–short‐term memory (LSTM) neural networks for intraday stock predictions, using a large variety of technical analysis indicators as network inputs. The proposed ensemble operates in an online way, weighting the individual models proportionally to their recent performance, which allows us to deal with possible nonstationarities in an innovative way. The performance of the models is measured by area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic. We evaluate the predictive power of our model on several US large‐cap stocks and benchmark it against lasso and ridge logistic classifiers. The proposed model is found to perform better than the benchmark models or equally weighted ensembles.     

The Informational Content of the Term Spread in Forecasting the US Inflation Rate: A Nonlinear Approach

The difficulty in modelling inflation and the significance in discovering the underlying data‐generating process of inflation is expressed in an extensive literature regarding inflation forecasting. In this paper we evaluate nonlinear machine learning and econometric methodologies in forecasting US inflation based on autoregressive and structural models of the term structure. We employ two nonlinear methodologies: the econometric least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and the machine‐learning support vector regression (SVR) method. The SVR has never been used before in inflation forecasting considering the term spread as a regressor. In doing so, we use a long monthly dataset spanning the period 1871:1–2015:3 that covers the entire history of inflation in the US economy. For comparison purposes we also use ordinary least squares regression models as a benchmark. In order to evaluate the contribution of the term spread in inflation forecasting in different time periods, we measure the out‐of‐sample forecasting performance of all models using rolling window regressions. Considering various forecasting horizons, the empirical evidence suggests that the structural models do not outperform the autoregressive ones, regardless of the model's method. Thus we conclude that the term spread models are not more accurate than autoregressive models in inflation forecasting. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting inflation using economic indicators: the case of France

In order to provide short‐run forecasts of headline and core HICP inflation for France, we assess the forecasting performance of a large set of economic indicators, individually and jointly, as well as using dynamic factor models. We run out‐of‐sample forecasts implementing the Stock and Watson (1999) methodology. We find that, according to usual statistical criteria, the combination of several indicators—in particular those derived from surveys—provides better results than factor models, even after pre‐selection of the variables included in the panel. However, factors included in VAR models exhibit more stable forecasting performance over time. Results for the HICP excluding unprocessed food and energy are very encouraging. Moreover, we show that the aggregation of forecasts on subcomponents exhibits the best performance for projecting total inflation and that it is robust to data snooping. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Short‐term forecasting of industrial electricity consumption in Brazil

This paper presents short‐term forecasting methods applied to electricity consumption in Brazil. The focus is on comparing the results obtained after using two distinct approaches: dynamic non‐linear models and econometric models. The first method, that we propose, is based on structural statistical models for multiple time series analysis and forecasting. It involves non‐observable components of locally linear trends for each individual series and a shared multiplicative seasonal component described by dynamic harmonics. The second method, adopted by the electricity power utilities in Brazil, consists of extrapolation of the past data and is based on statistical relations of simple or multiple regression type. To illustrate the proposed methodology, a numerical application is considered with real data. The data represents the monthly industrial electricity consumption in Brazil from the three main power utilities: Eletropaulo, Cemig and Light, situated at the major energy‐consuming states, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, respectively, in the Brazilian Southeast region. The chosen time period, January 1990 to September 1994, corresponds to an economically unstable period just before the beginning of the Brazilian Privatization Program. Implementation of the algorithms considered in this work was made via the statistical software S‐PLUS. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Structural,VAR and BVAR models of exchange rate determination: A comparison of their forecasting performance

This paper compares the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of a wide class of structural, BVAR and VAR models for major sterling exchange rates over different forecast horizons. As representative structural models we employ a portfolio balance model and a modified uncovered interest parity model, with the latter producing the more accurate forecasts. Proper attention to the long-run properties and the short-run dynamics of structural models can improve on the forecasting performance of the random walk model. The structural model shows substantial improvement in medium-term forecasting accuracy, whereas the BVAR model is the more accurate in the short term. BVAR and VAR models in levels strongly out predict these models formulated in difference form at all forecast horizons.     

Robust modelling of ARCH models

The autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (ARCH) model and its extensions have been widely used in modelling changing variances in financial time series. Since the asset return distributions frequently display tails heavier than normal distributions, it is worth while studying robust ARCH modelling without a specific distribution assumption. In this paper, rather than modelling the conditional variance, we study ARCH modelling for the conditional scale. We examine the L₁‐estimation of ARCH models and derive the limiting distributions of the estimators. A robust standardized absolute residual autocorrelation based on least absolute deviation estimation is proposed. Then a robust portmanteau statistic is constructed to test the adequacy of the model, especially the specification of the conditional scale. We obtain their asymptotic distributions under mild conditions. Examples show that the suggested L₁‐norm estimators and the goodness‐of‐fit test are robust against error distributions and are accurate for moderate sample sizes. This paper provides a useful tool in modelling conditional heteroscedastic time series data. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Short‐term forecasts of economic activity: Are fortnightly factors useful?

A short‐term mixed‐frequency model is proposed to estimate and forecast Italian economic activity fortnightly. We introduce a dynamic one‐factor model with three frequencies (quarterly, monthly, and fortnightly) by selecting indicators that show significant coincident and leading properties and are representative of both demand and supply. We conduct an out‐of‐sample forecasting exercise and compare the prediction errors of our model with those of alternative models that do not include fortnightly indicators. We find that high‐frequency indicators significantly improve the real‐time forecasts of Italian gross domestic product (GDP); this result suggests that models exploiting the information available at different lags and frequencies provide forecasting gains beyond those based on monthly variables alone. Moreover, the model provides a new fortnightly indicator of GDP, consistent with the official quarterly series.     

Forecasting daily foreign exchange rates using genetically optimized neural networks

Forecasting currency exchange rates is an important financial problem that has received much attention especially because of its intrinsic difficulty and practical applications. The statistical distribution of foreign exchange rates and their linear unpredictability are recurrent themes in the literature of international finance. Failure of various structural econometric models and models based on linear time series techniques to deliver superior forecasts to the simplest of all models, the simple random walk model, have prompted researchers to use various non‐linear techniques. A number of non‐linear time series models have been proposed in the recent past for obtaining accurate prediction results, in an attempt to ameliorate the performance of simple random walk models. In this paper, we use a hybrid artificial intelligence method, based on neural network and genetic algorithm for modelling daily foreign exchange rates. A detailed comparison of the proposed method with non‐linear statistical models is also performed. The results indicate superior performance of the proposed method as compared to the traditional non‐linear time series techniques and also fixed‐geometry neural network models. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The geometric combination of Bayesian forecasting models

A nonlinear geometric combination of statistical models is proposed as an alternative approach to the usual linear combination or mixture. Contrary to the linear, the geometric model is closed under the regular exponential family of distributions, as we show. As a consequence, the distribution which results from the combination is unimodal and a single location parameter can be chosen for decision making. In the case of Student t‐distributions (of particular interest in forecasting) the geometric combination can be unimodal under a sufficient condition we have established. A comparative analysis between the geometric and linear combinations of predictive distributions from three Bayesian regression dynamic linear models, in a case of beer sales forecasting in Zimbabwe, shows the geometric model to consistently outperform its linear counterpart as well as its component models. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Econometric modelling for short‐term inflation forecasting in the euro area

This paper examines the problem of forecasting macro‐variables which are observed monthly (or quarterly) and result from geographical and sectorial aggregation. The aim is to formulate a methodology whereby all relevant information gathered in this context could provide more accurate forecasts, be frequently updated, and include a disaggregated explanation as useful information for decision‐making. The appropriate treatment of the resulting disaggregated data set requires vector modelling, which captures the long‐run restrictions between the different time series and the short‐term correlations existing between their stationary transformations. Frequently, due to a lack of degrees of freedom, the vector model must be restricted to a block‐diagonal vector model. This methodology is applied in this paper to inflation in the euro area, and shows that disaggregated models with cointegration restrictions improve accuracy in forecasting aggregate macro‐variables. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.