19 reasons to attend ISF 2021 (virtual - starting June 27)

International Symposium on Forecasting (virtual, June 27 - July 2)

The 41st International Symposium on Forecasting will be virtual again this year, and begins Sunday June 27. SAS will have a huge presence -- as event sponsor, sponsor of the IIF/SAS Research Grants, and with 19 individual presentations.

ISF registration is free to members of the International Institute of Forecasters, and it is easy to Join the IIF. A one-year Premium membership costs $145 and includes hardcopy subscriptions (plus online access) to both IIF journals: the International Journal of Forecasting and Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting.

Students can join for just $25 per year, which includes online-only access to both journals.

As a truly international event, presentations run literally around-the-clock from Monday June 28 through mid-day on Wednesday June 30. Special half-day Workshops run on Sunday June 27, as well as Thursday July 1 and Friday July 2. (Workshops require a $50 additional fee.)

In addition to the SAS presentations and the Practitioner Track listed below, here are several other sessions I'm looking forward to (all dates/times EDT). Be ready to get up early and stay up late:

Workshop: Deep Learning for Forecasting - Tim Januschowski & Lorenzo Stella (Sunday June 27, 14:00-18:00)

Accuracy, Explainability, and Trust in Business Forecasting - Simon Spavound (Monday June 28, 04:00-04:20)

Re-Analysis of Intermittent Demand Forecasting Methods - John Boylan (Monday June 28, 08:40-09:00)

Opening Welcome / Members Meeting - George Athanasopoulos & IIF Board of Directors (Monday June 28, 09:00-10:00)

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Data Points: An Image-Based Time Series Forecasting Approach - Artemios-Anargyros Semenoglou (Monday June 28, 15:00-15:20)

Size Does Matter: Timer Series Augmentation for Enhanced Cross-Learning - Evangelos Spiliotis (Monday June 28, 15:20-15:40)

Forecasting Uncertainty: The Quest for Quantification - Steve Morlidge (Monday June 28, 16:00-16:20)

Keynote: Humachine: Humankind, Machines, and the Future of the Enterprise - Nada Sanders (Monday June 28, 18:00-19:00)

Probabilistic Ensemble Forecasting of Australian COVID-19 Cases - Rob Hyndman (Monday June 28, 21:40-22:00)

Some Theoretical Ways in which FVA Analysis Can Be Misleading and How This Can Be Remedied - Paul Goodwin (Tuesday June 29, 05:20-05:40)

Stylised Facts of FVA, a Meta-Analysis Where Do Judgmental Adjustments Improve Accuracy? - Robert Fildes (Tuesday June 29, 05:40-06:00)

Algorithm Aversion or Algorithm Appreciation? - Shari De Baets (Tuesday June 29, 06:00-06:20)

Using Judgmental Forecasting and Scenario Thinking for Anticipating the Future - George Wright (Tuesday June 29, 06:20-06:40)

Judgmental Interventions: Model Tuning and Forecast Adjustments in a Retailing Case Study - Anna Sroginis (Tuesday June 29, 06:40-07:00)

Evaluating the Impact of Business Practices on Inventory Performance - Evangelos Theodorou (Tuesday June 29, 08:20-08:40)

New Product Life-Cycle Forecasting with Temporal Hierarchies - Oliver Schaer (Tuesday June 29, 08:20-08:40)

Demand Forecasting Under Lost-Sales Stock Policies - Juan Trapero (Tuesday June 29, 08:40-09:00)

Fast and Frugal Time Series Forecasting - Fotios Petropoulos (Tuesday June 29, 11:40-12:00)

Prediction Intervals: Neglected Diagnostics? - Keith Ord (Tuesday June 29, 16:00-16:20)

Estimating Interval Forecasts using Pruned Ensembles - Erick Meira (Tuesday June 29, 16:20-16:40)

General NN Forecaster - Slawek Smyl (Tuesday June 29, 16:20-16:40)

Forecast Combinations, Pooling, and Hierarchies: How do They Combine? - Nikos Kourentzes (Tuesday June 29, 17:40-18:00)

Forecasting for Social Good - Bahman Rostami-Tabar (Wednesday June 30, 08:40-09:00)

Keynote: Forecasting Climate Change, Pandemics and Econometrics - David Hendry (Wednesday June 30, 10:00-11:00)

Workshop: Forecasting to Meet Demand - Stephan Kolassa & Roland Martin (Thursday July 1, 14:00-18:00)

Workshop: Business Forecasting: Techniques, Application and Best Practices - Eric Stellwagen & Sarah Darin (Thursday July 1, 14:00-18:00)

Workshop: Evaluating Forecasting Performance - Evangelos Spiliotis (Friday July 2, 14:00-18:00)

SAS Presentations (date/time is EDT)

Monday June 28

Session: Demand Forecasting 2 (06:00-07:00)

Demand Forecasting in Times of COVID - Michel Kurcewicz (06:40-07:00)

Session: Open Source Forecasting in SAS (11:00 - 12:20)

Accelerate Open Source Forecasting with SAS (Part 1) - Jessica Curtis

Accelerate Open Source Forecasting with SAS (Part 2) - Andrea Moore

Deep Learning for Retail Sales Forecasting - Szymon Haponiuk

Major Paradigm Shifts in Modern Forecasting Methodology - Russ Wolfinger

Practitioner Track: Large-Scale New Product Forecasting: A ML-Based Approach - Nitzi Roehl (13:00-13:30)

Session: COVID-19 Forecasting: Exploring and Modeling Data (14:00-15:20)

Location Network Analysis and Supervised ML Models to Identify VIrus Spread Trends - Carlos Pinheiro

Evaluation of Statistical Models for Producing Weekly COVID-19 Forecast - Ran Bi

Representing and Forecasting COVID-19 Pandemic Using Differential Equation Models - Marc Kessler

Visualization by Pattern Similarity for COVID-19 Data Set - Youngjin Park

Session: Forecasting and Uncertainty (16:00-16:40)

The Forecaster's Predicament: Issues with Communicating Uncertainty - Mike Gilliland (16:20-16:40)

Session: Forecasting and Software (17:00-18:00)

Scalable Cloud-Based Automatic Time Series Imputation - Thiago Quirino

Forecasting Software Trends for the Next Decade - Michele Trovero

Using Open Source Machine Learning Algorithms in SAS Visual Forecasting - Javier Delgado

Tuesday June 29

Session: Time Series Clustering for Forecasting (02:00-03:00)

Time Series Segmentation Using Two-Stage Clustering Approach - Sagar Mainkar (02:00-02:20)

Session: Retail Forecasting 2 (09:00-10:00)

Enhancing Short-Term Demand Sensing Using Machine Learning - Charles Chase (09:20-09:40)

Session: Automated Forecasting (11:00-12:00)

Monitoring Forecast Model Fitness Using Control Charts - Joe Katz (11:20-11:40)

Session: Neural Networks 2 (16:00-17:00)

Time Series Forecasting with Time Series Plot and Computer Vision - Taiyeong Lee (16:40-17:00)

Friday July 2

Workshop: Formulating State Space Models - Rajesh Selukar (14:00-18:00)

Practitioner Track

Again this year the ISF will feature a special Practitioner Track of 30-minute presentations from ten top contributors to the field (see the link for session times, titles, and abstracts):

Alla Anashenkova, ThroughPut Inc

Patrick Bower, Combe International

Simon Clarke, Argon & Co

Ran Ding, Google

Stefa Etchegaray Garcia, IBM

Jonathon Karelse, NorthFind Management

Sara Park, Coca-Cola

Nitzi Roehl, SAS

Niels van Hove, Aera Technology

Dawn Woodard, Uber

Register here to attend (virtual) ISF 2021. As you can see, there are a lot more than 19 good reasons to attend!