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Parker’s Rules for Historical Counterfactuals

I found an interesting quote in a book I’m reading titled “What If?”, a collection of essays by historians dealing with counterfactual history. (I’m currently supporting a program developing techniques for counterfactual forecasting.). The quote by Geoffrey Parker is “Counterfactual experiments in history should always include two limitations: the “minimal rewrite rule” (only small and …

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Paper: Are forecasting competitions data representative of the reality?

This paper by Spiliotis et. al, in the special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting on the M4 Competition is an interesting look at characterizing the time series in forecasting competitions according to statistical properties. The paper references work of Kang, et. al. (2017) which identifies 6 features to characterize time series, including properties …

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The Reasonable Effectiveness of Ensembles in Predictions for COVID-19

NPR’s Morning Edition featured a small segment on the development of an ensemble model for COVID-19 by a biostatistician at UMASS Amherst, Nicholas Reich. Basically, combining multiple models intelligently produces a a better model than the individual components. This finding is helpful if not surprising. Ensemble techniques have been used in multiple disciplines, especially weather …

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Bayesian Estimation in Generalized Bass Model for Sales Forecasts

The most recent International Journal of Forecasting includes a paper titled “Forecasting from other’s experience: Bayesian estimation of the generalized Bass model.” by Ramirez-Hassan and Montoya-Blandon. The Bass model is a mature diffusion model to replicate and forecast sales using few parameters (innovation or early-adopter coefficient, imitation coefficient, and short-run potential market size). The generalized …

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Microsoft Azure

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/ I have not tried this yet, but it looks interesting to me.  It provides cloud-based access to machine learning models using a web browser. From the link above: Azure Machine Learning offers a streamlined experience for all data scientist skill levels, from setting up with only a web browser, to using drag and drop …

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