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.
Business forecasting is a dismal field of endeavor, fit for dismal people like myself. In an attempt to make this field interesting to people who aren't so dismal by nature, our friends at PollyVote Election Forecasting ask the question: Could you be President of the United States? The PollyVote project is
Is there a forecasting problem you'd like to attack, and wouldn't mind a little financial support to do it? If so, the SAS/IIF Grant to Support Research on Forecasting may be just what you need to get started. For the tenth year, in collaboration with the International Institute of Forecasters,
The Perils Revisited A few posts ago I warned of the perils of forecasting benchmarks, and why they should not be used to set your forecasting performance objectives: Can you trust the data? Is measurement consistent across the respondents? Is the comparison relevant? In addition to a general suspicion about
