Accurately measuring a population and its attributes at past, present, and future points in time has been of great interest to demographers. Within discussions of forecast accuracy, demographers have often been criticized for their inaccurate prognostications of the future. Discussions of methods and data are usually at the center of these criticisms, along with suggestions for providing an ide...

The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) have both developed software packages with the capability to verify model forecasts using several verification methods. NCEP employs both the NCEP Verification System (NVS) and the Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) Verification System (QVS), while the DTC uses the Model Evaluation Tools (...

Recent work has emphasized the importance of evaluating forecasts of a statistical functional (such as a mean, quantile, or distribution) using a loss function that is consistent for the functional of interest, of which there are an in…nite number. If forecasters all use correctly speci…ed models free from estimation error, and if the information sets of competing forecasters are nested, then t...

Proper scoring rules are a means of evaluating the quality of probabilistic forecasts. They induce dissimilarity measures of probability distributions known as Bregman divergences. We survey the literature on both entities and present their mathematical properties in a unified theoretical framework. This perspective allows us to identify score and Bregman divergences and characterize them toget...

The National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) indices deduced from RSM 50-km 1-day simulations from January 1998 through December 2003 are used in conjunction with a probability model to determine the expected number of fire occurrences and large fire events. The RSM simulation and forecasts are ongoing experimental products from the Experimental Climate Prediction Center (ECPC) at Scripps Ins...