Forecasting contemporaneous aggregates and the combination of forecasts: The case of the U.K. monetary aggregates

A number of papers in recent years have investigated the problems of forecasting contemporaneously aggregated time series and of combining alternative forecasts of a time series. This paper considers the integration of both approaches within the example of assessing the forecasting performance of models for two of the U.K. monetary aggregates, £M3 and MO. It is found that forecasts from a time series model for aggregate £M3 are superior to aggregated forecasts from individual models fitted to either the components or counterparts of £M3 and that an even better forecast is obtained by forming a linear combination of the three alternatives. For MO, however, aggregated forecasts from its components prove superior to either the forecast from the aggregate itself or from a linear combination of the two.     

Some practical aspects of forecasting in organizations

This paper presents the writer's experience, over a period of 25 years, in analysing organizational systems and, in particular, concentrates on the overall forecasting activity. The paper first looks at the relationship between forecasting and decision taking–with emphasis on the fact that forecasting is a means to aid decision taking and not an end in itself. It states that there are many types of forecasting problems, each requiring different methods of treatment. The paper then discusses attitudes which are emerging about the relative advantages of different forecasting techniques. It suggests a model building process which requires‘experience’and‘craftsmanship’, extensive practical application, frequent interaction between theory and practice and a methodology that eventually leads to models that contain no detectable inadequacies. Furthermore, it argues that although models which forecast a time series from its past history have a very important role to play, for effective policy making it is necessary to augment the model by introducing policy variables, again in a systematic not an ‘ad hoc’ manner. Finally, the paper discusses how forecasting systems can be introduced into the management process in the first place and how they should be monitored and updated when found wanting.     

Forecasting interest rates through Vasicek and CIR models: A partitioning approach

The aim of this paper is to propose a new methodology that allows forecasting, through Vasicek and CIR models, of future expected interest rates based on rolling windows from observed financial market data. The novelty, apart from the use of those models not for pricing but for forecasting the expected rates at a given maturity, consists in an appropriate partitioning of the data sample. This allows capturing all the statistically significant time changes in volatility of interest rates, thus giving an account of jumps in market dynamics. The new approach is applied to different term structures and is tested for both models. It is shown how the proposed methodology overcomes both the usual challenges (e.g., simulating regime switching, volatility clustering, skewed tails) as well as the new ones added by the current market environment characterized by low to negative interest rates.     

The performance of non‐linear exchange rate models: a forecasting comparison

In recent years there has been a considerable development in modelling non‐linearities and asymmetries in economic and financial variables. The aim of the current paper is to compare the forecasting performance of different models for the returns of three of the most traded exchange rates in terms of the US dollar, namely the French franc (FF/$), the German mark (DM/$) and the Japanese yen (Y/$). The relative performance of non‐linear models of the SETAR, STAR and GARCH types is contrasted with their linear counterparts. The results show that if attention is restricted to mean square forecast errors, the performance of the models, when distinguishable, tends to favour the linear models. The forecast performance of the models is evaluated also conditional on the regime at the forecast origin and on density forecasts. This analysis produces more evidence of forecasting gains from non‐linear models. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Estimating trend growth rates of the U.K. monetary aggregates

This paper constructs current trend growth rates for a variety of U.K. monetary aggregates. These rates are computed from decompositions of intervention-augmented ARIMA models, the interventions being identified and their magnitude estimated by an iterative detection procedure.     

Evaluating the predictive accuracy of volatility models

Standard statistical loss functions, such as mean‐squared error, are commonly used for evaluating financial volatility forecasts. In this paper, an alternative evaluation framework, based on probability scoring rules that can be more closely tailored to a forecast user's decision problem, is proposed. According to the decision at hand, the user specifies the economic events to be forecast, the scoring rule with which to evaluate these probability forecasts, and the subsets of the forecasts of particular interest. The volatility forecasts from a model are then transformed into probability forecasts of the relevant events and evaluated using the selected scoring rule and calibration tests. An empirical example using exchange rate data illustrates the framework and confirms that the choice of loss function directly affects the forecast evaluation results. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Measuring the market risk of freight rates: A forecast combination approach

This paper addresses the issue of freight rate risk measurement via value at risk (VaR) and forecast combination methodologies while focusing on detailed performance evaluation. We contribute to the literature in three ways: First, we reevaluate the performance of popular VaR estimation methods on freight rates amid the adverse economic consequences of the recent financial and sovereign debt crisis. Second, we provide a detailed and extensive backtesting and evaluation methodology. Last, we propose a forecast combination approach for estimating VaR. Our findings suggest that our combination methods produce more accurate estimates for all the sectors under scrutiny, while in some cases they may be viewed as conservative since they tend to overestimate nominal VaR.     

Evidence of long memory in short‐term interest rates

The issues of non‐stationarity and long memory of real interest rates are examined here. Autoregressive models allowing short‐term mean reversion are compared with fractional integration models in terms of their ability to explain the behaviour of the data and to forecast out‐of‐sample. The data used are weekly observations of 3‐month Eurodeposit rates for 10 countries, adjusted for inflation, for 14 years. Following Brenner, Harjes and Kroner, the volatility of these rates is shown to both exhibit GARCH effects and depend on the level of interest rates. Although relatively little support is found for the hypothesis of mean reversion, evidence of long memory in interest rate changes is found for seven countries. The out‐of‐sample forecasting performance for a year ahead of the fractional integrated models was significantly better than a no change. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting with latent structure time series models: an application to nominal interest rates

In this paper we develop a latent structure extension of a commonly used structural time series model and use the model as a basis for forecasting. Each unobserved regime has its own unique slope and variances to describe the process generating the data, and at any given time period the model predicts a priori which regime best characterizes the data. This is accomplished by using a multinomial logit model in which the primary explanatory variable is a measure of how consistent each regime has been with recent observations. The model is especially well suited to forecasting series which are subject to frequent and/or major shocks. An application to nominal interest rates shows that the behaviour of the three‐month US Treasury bill rate is adequately explained by three regimes. The forecasting accuracy is superior to that produced by a traditional single‐regime model and a standard ARIMA model with a conditionally heteroscedastic error. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sources of error in forecasts and expectations: U.K. economic models, 1984–8

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the sources of error in forecasts for the UK economy published over a recent four-year period by four independent groups. This analysis rests on the archiving at the ESRC Macroeconomic Modelling Bureau of the original forecasts together with all their accompanying assumptions and adjustments. A method of decomposing observed forecast errors so as to distinguish the contributions of forecaster and model is set out; the impact of future expectations treated in a ‘model-consistent’ or ‘rational’ manner is specifically considered. The results show that the forecaster's adjustments make a substantial contribution to forecast performance, a good part of which comes from adjustments that bring the model on track at the start of the forecast period. The published ex-ante forecasts are usually superior to pure model-based ex-post forecasts, whose performance indicates some misspecification of the underlying models.     

Forecasts of power-transformed series

Consider a time series transformed by an instantaneous power function of the Box-Cox type. For a wide range of fractional powers, this paper gives the relative bias in original metric forecasts due to use of the simple inverse retransformation when minimum mean squared error (conditional mean) forecasts are optimal. This bias varies widely according to the characteristics of the data. A fast algorithm is given to find this bias, or to find minimum mean squared error forecasts in the original metric. The results depend on the assumption that the forecast errors in the transformed metric are Gaussian. An example using real data is given.     

Predicting exchange rates in Asia: New insights on the accuracy of survey forecasts

By linking measures of forecast accuracy as well as testing procedures with regard to forecast rationality this paper investigates aggregated survey forecasts with forecast horizons of 3, 12, and 24 months for the exchange rates of the Chinese yuan, the Hong Kong dollar, the Japanese yen, and the Singapore dollar vis-à-vis the US dollar and, hence, for four different currency regimes. The rationality of the exchange rate predictions is initially assessed utilizing tests for unbiasedness and efficiency which indicate that the investigated forecasts are irrational in the sense that the predictions are biased. As one major contribution of this paper, it is subsequently shown that these results are not consistent with an alternative, less restrictive, measure of rationality. Investigating the order of integration of the time series as well as cointegrating relationships, this empirical evidence supports the conclusion that the majority of forecasts are in fact rational. Regarding forerunning properties of the predictions, the results are rather mediocre, with shorter term forecasts for the tightly managed USD/CNY FX regime being one exception. As one additional important and novel evaluation result, it can be concluded, that the currency regime matters for the quality of exchange rate forecasts.     

The combination of macroeconomic forecasts

The paper examines combined forecasts based on two components: forecasts produced by Chase Econometrics and those produced using the Box-Jenkins ARIMA technique. Six series of quarterly ex ante and simulated ex ante forecasts are used over 37 time periods and ten horizons. The forecasts are combined using seven different methods. The best combined forecasts, judged by average relative root-mean-square error, are superior to the Chase forecasts for three variables and inferior for two, though averaged over all six variables the Chase forecasts are slightly better. A two-step procedure produces forecasts for the last half of the sample which, on average, are slightly better than the Chase forecasts.     

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.     

The role of time series analysis in the evaluation of econometric models

This paper compares the properties of a structural model—the London Business School model of the U.K. economy—with a time series model. Information provided by this type of comparison is a useful diagnostic tool for detecting types of model misspecification. This is a more meaningful way of proceeding rather than attempting to establish the superiority of one type of model over another. In lieu of a better structural model, the effects of inappropriate dynamic specification can be reduced by combining the forecasts of both the structural and time series models. For many variables considered here these provide more accurate forecasts than each of the model types alone.     

美国登月火箭项目进展

研究美国登月火箭的项目管理有助于我国探月工程的规划。2004年美国公布重返月球计划。为实现这一目标,美国国家航空航天局决定以航天飞机推进系统为基础研制新型运载火箭。新火箭于2006年被命名为“战神”,包括“战神”-1乘员运载火箭和“战神”-5货物运载火箭两种型号。目前,“战神”-1火箭已完成系统需求评审,进入设计评审阶段。火箭第一级、上面级、上面级发动机以及电子设备的研制合同都已于2007年授出。预计2009年5月进行首次试验飞行,2015年3月进行首次载人飞行。而“战神”-5火箭还处于早期研究阶段。由于预算调整和航天项目的复杂性,“战神”火箭的研制已经有所拖延。虽然大型航天集团和国家航空航天局努力争取更多预算,但“战神”火箭未来的研制不排除进一步拖延的可能。     

从近年科技投入变化看美国科技政策的变化

美国能够成为世界头号科技大国，其科技政策功不可没。近年来，美国不断调整其科技政策以保证站在世界的最前列，这可以从美国在科技中投入的不断变化看出来。本文基于冷战结束至今美国在科技中投入的变化，分析了美国科技政策十几年来的变化特点。     

美国气候变化技术计划(CCTP)新战略规划及其对我国的启示

美国气候变化技术计划(CCTP)于2006年9月公布了新的气候变化技术计划战略规划,新规划将通过捕集、减少以及储存的方式来控制温室气体的排放量。该计划中包含的技术有氢能源、生物提炼、清洁煤、碳储存、核分裂和聚变能等,这些技术以最基础的方式转化为国民经济价值,不仅能够改善气候变化,而且可以保证能源安全、空气污染以及其他紧迫需求。本文对美国气候变化技术计划战略规划的任务、目标、方法进行概要介绍,并论述了其对我国气候变化技术发展的重要启示。     

How accurate are the U.S. Bureau of the Census projections of total live births

"The accuracy of total live birth forecasts issued by the U.S. Bureau of the Census was analysed. Forecast accuracy has not improved significantly since 1950. Further, the forecasts are not more accurate than several naive alternatives. Moving from a period methodology to a cohort methodology improved forecast accuracy for certain forecasts. [It is demonstrated that] the Bureau of the Census systematically underestimated total births in the upswing and overestimated in the downswing."