Michael Gilliland is a longtime business forecasting practitioner and formerly a Product Marketing Manager for SAS Forecasting. He is on the Board of Directors of the International Institute of Forecasters, and is Associate Editor of their practitioner journal Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. Mike is author of The Business Forecasting Deal (Wiley, 2010) and former editor of the free e-book Forecasting with SAS: Special Collection (SAS Press, 2020). He is principal editor of Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions (Wiley, 2015) and Business Forecasting: The Emerging Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (Wiley, 2021). In 2017 Mike received the Institute of Business Forecasting's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2021 his paper "FVA: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices" was inducted into the Foresight Hall of Fame. Mike initiated The Business Forecasting Deal blog in 2009 to help expose the seamy underbelly of forecasting practice, and to provide practical solutions to its most vexing problems.
For the fourteenth year, the International Institute of Forecasters, in collaboration with SAS®, is proud to announce financial support for research on how to improve forecasting methods and business forecasting practice. The award for the 2016-2017 year will be two $5,000 grants, in Business Applications and Methodology. Criteria for the
The online SAS Support Communities are a vibrant source of information and interaction for over 90,000 registered participants. Here you can ask (and answer) questions, grow (and share) your SAS expertise, and explore these collection points for other resources (like hot tips, articles, blogs, and events) relating to the community
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Summer Issue of Foresight Clarity and effectiveness of communication are key to success – so says a recent survey by the National Association of Business Economists (NABE), which reported that industry leaders and hiring managers considered communication skills to be the single most important
Paul Goodwin is Professor Emeritus of Management Science at University of Bath, and one of the speakers at this fall's Foresight Practitioner Conference (October 5-6 in Raleigh, NC). His topic will be "Use and Abuse of Judgmental Overrides to Statistical Forecasts"-- an area in which he has contributed much of
Let's continue now to Nikolaos Kourentzes' blog post on How to choose a forecast for your time series. Using a Validation Sample Nikos first discusses the fairly common approach of using a validation or "hold out" sample. The idea is to build your model based on a subset of the
Nikolaos Kourentzes is Associate Professor at Lancaster University, and a member of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting. In addition to having a great head of hair for a forecasting professor, Nikos has a great head for explaining fundamental forecasting concepts. In his recent blog post on How to choose a
SAS® Insights is a section of the sas.com website devoted to being "your top source for analytics news and views." It contains articles, interviews, research reports, and other content from both SAS and non-SAS contributors. In a new article posted this week, we added three short videos containing practical advice
Sometimes one's job gets in the way of one's blogging. My last three months have been occupied with the launch of SAS® Viya™, our next-generation high-performance and visualization architecture. Please take the time to find more information on the SAS Viya website, and apply for a free preview. Rob Hyndman
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Spring Issue of Foresight Misbehaving, the feature section of this 41st issue of Foresight, was prompted by the publication of Richard Thaler’s eye-opening book of the same title, a work that explains the often surprising gap between (a) the models we use and organizational
The new book Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions contains a large section of recent articles on forecasting performance evaluation and reporting. Among the contributing authors is Rob Hyndman, Professor of Statistics at Monash University in Australia. To anyone needing an introduction, Hyndman's credentials include: Editor-in-chief of International Journal of
"The Role of Model Interpretability in Data Science" is a recent post on Medium.com by Carl Anderson, Director of Data Science at the fashion eyeware company Warby Parker. Anderson argues that data scientists should be willing to make small sacrifices in model quality in order to deliver a model that
Editor Len Tashman's preview of the Winter 2016 issue of Foresight This 40th issue of Foresight begins with a review of the new book by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner with the enticing title Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Reviewer Steve Morlidge explains that …the “superforecasters” of the
Announcing New Book: Business Forecasting Just in time for the new year, Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions compiles the field's most important and thought provoking new literature into a single comprehensive reference for the business forecaster. So says the marketing literature. The real story? The book does pretty much
In conjunction with the International Institute of Forecasters and the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, the 2016 Foresight Practitioner conference will be held in Raleigh, NC (October 5-6, 2016) with the theme of: Worst Practices in Forecasting: Today's Mistakes to Tomorrow's Breakthroughs This is the first
"Why forecasting is important" gets searched over 100 times monthly on Google. Search results include plenty of rah-rah articles touting the obvious benefits of an "accurate forecast," but are of little help in the real life business world where high levels of forecast accuracy are usually not achieved. This is
Journal of Business Forecasting columnist Larry Lapide is a longtime favorite of mine. As an industry analyst at AMR, and more recently as an MIT Research Affiliate, Larry's quarterly column is a perpetual source of guidance for the practicing business forecaster. No wonder he received IBF's 2012 Lifetime Achievement in
WRAL Chief Meteorologist (and Friend Of the Business Forecasting Deal) Greg Fishel garnered national attention recently with a thoughtful (yet to some, provocative) blog post on climate change. In the post, Fishel chronicled his evolving thought on the subject. He argued for an end to the political partisanship that stifles
Last week I had the pleasure of attending (with six of my SAS colleagues) the IBF's Best Practices Forecasting Conference in Orlando. Some of the highlights: Charlie Chase and I were interviewed by Russell Goodman of SupplyChainBrain.com. The videos will be posted on SCB's website later this year. Meantime, enjoy
So you think you know how to forecast? Now is your chance to prove it, by participating in a probabilistic load forecasting competition run by my friend (and former SAS colleague), Dr. Tao Hong. Currently a professor at UNC Charlotte and director of the Big Data Energy Analytics Laboratory (BigDEAL),
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Fall 2015 issue of Foresight This 39th issue of Foresight features a special section on forecasting support systems (FSS) developed by our FSS Editor Fotios Petropoulos. His article Forecasting Support Systems: Ways Forward highlights three main areas for improvement: better utilization of open-source software
You may not be in London on October 7 to take advantage of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting's free workshop on promotional forecasting. However, there are still plenty of forecasting educational opportunities coming up this fall: SAS Business Knowledge Series Best Practices in Demand-Driven Forecasting (Chicago, September 24-25) My colleague
Our friends at the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting have announced their next free practitioner workshop. It will be held Wednesday October 7,1:00-5:15pm, at BMA House, Tavistock Square, London WC1H. This session's top is: Promotional Modelling and Forecasting Understanding and forecasting the effects of a promotion for both retailers and manufacturers
So you think you can outsmart your statistical forecast? Apparently, lots of people do. In "Judgmental Adjustments to Forecasts in the New Economy" (Foresight, Issue 38 (Summer 2015), 31-36), Manzoor Chowdhury and Sonia Manzoor argue that forecasters are becoming more dependent on judgmental adjustments to a statistical forecast. Sometimes this
SAS/IIF Grant to Promote Research on Forecasting For the thirteenth year, the International Institute of Forecasters, in collaboration with SAS, is proud to announce financial support for research on how to improve forecasting methods and business forecasting practice. The award for the 2015-2016 year will be (2) $5,000 grants. The
The Two-Bin Inventory Control System So what is a two-bin inventory control system? Whether you realize it or not, you are probably very familiar with the concept. In fact, if you are reading this on a tablet or smartphone, you may be sitting next to one right now (see photo). According to
As discussed in the last BFD post, sometimes a difficult and expensive problem doesn't have to be solved -- it can simply be avoided. When the teetering boulder threatened the baby below the cliff, we removed the baby and no longer had to worry about propping up the boulder. When it
The Boulder, The Cliff, and The Baby Imagine you are faced with this very urgent problem: A large boulder is teetering on the edge of a cliff, at the bottom of which sits a baby, at risk of being crushed. How do you solve this problem? One solution for the
The SAS Business Knowledge Series now offers an online version of the "Forecast Value Added Analysis" course, taught via live web in two afternoon sessions, May 7-8. The instructor is my colleague Chip Wells, who expanded our original 1/2 day FVA workshop with new material, examples, and exercises based on his
The Institute of Business Forecasting's FVA blog series continued on March 2, with my interview of Steve Morlidge of CatchBull. Steve's research (and his articles in Foresight) have been a frequent subject of BFD blog posts over the last couple of years (e.g. The "Avoidability of Forecast Error (4 parts),
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Spring issue of Foresight The Special Feature article of this 37th issue of Foresight – From Sales and Operations Planning to Business Integration – comes about through a rare but effective collaboration between an academic and a practitioner. The coauthors are Mark Moon, head
