Generally, we value forecasts for their accuracy. In some cases, however, the forecasts themselves are interesting because of what they reveal about the forecaster. Monetary policymaker forecasts are important because they partially reveal what policymakers believe will follow from their decisions. Forecasts of inflation and real output (whether made by Federal Reserve officials or private sect...

We combine the probability forecasts of a real GDP decline from the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters, after trimming the forecasts that do not have "value", as measured by the Kuiper Skill Score and in the sense of Merton (1981). For this purpose, we use a simple test to evaluate the probability forecasts. The proposed test does not require the probabilities to be converted to binary for...

The accuracy of 1,514 strategic intelligence forecasts abstracted from intelligence reports was assessed. The results show that both discrimination and calibration of forecasts was very good. Discrimination was better for senior (versus junior) analysts and for easier (versus harder) forecasts. Miscalibration was mainly due to underconfidence such that analysts assigned more uncertainty than ne...

Forecasting volatility has received a great deal of research attention. Many articles have considered the relative performance of econometric model based and option implied volatility forecasts. While many studies have found that implied volatility is the preferred approach, a number of issues remain unresolved. One issue being the relative merit of combination forecasts. By utilising recent ec...

‘‘Iterated’’ multiperiod-ahead time series forecasts are made using a one-period ahead model, iterated forward for the desired number of periods, whereas ‘‘direct’’ forecasts are made using a horizon-specific estimated model, where the dependent variable is the multiperiod ahead value being forecasted. Which approach is better is an empirical matter: in theory, iterated forecasts are more effic...

As part of a regional integrated assessment of climate vulnerability, a survey was conducted from June 1998 to May 2000 of weather, climate, and hydrologic forecasts with coverage of the US Southwest and an emphasis on the Colorado River Basin. The survey addresses the types of forecasts that were issued, the organizations that provided them, and techniques used in their generation. It reflects...

The spatial resolution of publicly available numerical weather forecasts is largely limited by the computing resources of the originating weather services. Only selected parameters are available to the public from many weather services. We present a scalable system for distributed computation of high resolution symbiotic numerical weather forecasts. Each forecast is computed on the user’s deskt...

This study investigates the performance of combination forecasts in comparison to individual forecasts. The empirical study focuses on the UK outbound leisure tourism demand for the USA. The combination forecasts are based on the competing forecasts generated from seven individual forecasting techniques. The three combination methods examined in this study are: the simple average combination me...

Operational weather forecasts now allow two week probabilistic forecasts of wave height. This paper discusses methods for generating such forecasts from numerical model output from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting Ensemble Prediction System. The ECMWF system produces Monte Carlo style forecasts of wave statistics out to a lead time of 10 days. This ensemble of forecasts ...

One-year-ahead forecasts by the OECD and by national institutes of GDP growth and inflation in 13 European countries are analysed. RMSE was large: 1.9 % for growth and 1.6 % for inflation. Six (11) OECD and 10 (7) institute growth forecast records were significantly better than an average growth forecast (the current year forecast). All full record-length inflation forecasts were significantly ...