"Forecastability" is a frequent topic of discussion on The BFD, and an essential consideration when evaluating the effectiveness of any forecasting process. A major critique of forecasting benchmarks is that they fail to take forecastability into consideration: An organization with "best in class" forecast accuracy may do so only because
Mercifully, we have reached the final installment of Q&A from the June 20 Foresight-SAS webinar, "Forecast Value Added: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices." As a reminder, a recording of the webinar is available for on-demand review, and the Foresight article (upon which the webinar was based) is available for free
Q: Is the MAPE of the naive forecast the basis for understanding the forecastability of the behavior? Or are there other more in depth ways to measure the forecastability of a behavior? MAPE of the naive forecast indicates the worst you should be able to forecast the behavior. You can
Q: What is a legitimate goal to expect from your FVA...5%, 10%? Q: How do we set Target FVA which Forecasters can drive towards? The appropriate goal is to do no worse than a naive model, that is FVA ≥ 0. Sometimes, especially over short periods of time, you may
Please enjoy a much-needed break from FVA Q&A with editor Len Tashman's preview of the Summer 2013 issue of Foresight: Enlightenment has been our guiding principle through this, our 30th issue of Foresight. Since the journal’s inception in 2005, our mission has been to help the forecasting profession come to
With this Q&A Part 3, we are about halfway through the questions submitted during the FVA webinar. We did over 15 minutes of live Q&A at the end of the webinar, and covered many of the submitted questions at that time, however I always prefer to issue complete written responses to
Q: Could you send me the presentation? With audio if possible. If you'd like a pdf of the slides, email me directly: mike.gilliland@sas.com For the audio, the webinar recording is available for free on-demand review: FVA: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices Q: Can we get the case study referred here
As promised in yesterday's Foresight-SAS sponsored webinar on "Forecast Value Added: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices," here is Part 1 of my written response to the over 25 questions that were submitted during the event. (Note: It may take a week or so to get through all of them.)
If an organization is spending time and money to have a forecasting process, is it not reasonable to expect the process to make the forecast more accurate and less biased (or at least not make it any worse!)? But how would we ever know what the process is accomplishing? To
"Why Should I Trust Your Forecasts?" now available on-demand The SAS / Foresight webinar series had a rousing kickoff on April 24, with Paul Goodwin asking (and answering) the question, "Why Should I Trust Your Forecasts?" The webinar is now available for free on-demand review . Be sure to stick
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of Foresight For a look at articles in the Spring issue of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, here is editor Len Tashman's preview: Kevin Foley is an IIF–Certified Forecaster with over 15 years of consultant experience in defense and aerospace companies. Drawing on this
This week Nate Silver, renowned election forecaster (fivethirtyeight blog) and top selling author (of the excellent The Signal and the Noise), spoke at an event here in my building on the SAS campus. Unfortunately, I wasn't considered a B enough of a FD to land an invite to Nate's presentation. However,
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of Foresight Foresight has always presented its methods-based articles as either tutorials, which introduce and illustrate a methodology in nontechnical language, or as case studies, with a focus on the practical issues and challenges in generating forecasts. We lead off this issue with two practical issues articles. First, Stephan
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of Foresight The importance of trust in the dissemination of forecasts through an organization cannot be overstated. Lack of trust, due in no small measure to the biases arising from “silo mentalities” and misplaced incentives, can and too often does undermine the forecasting process. Foresight has
US Presidential Race Going to the Dogs Mitt Romney transporting his dog on the roof rack. Barack Obama eating dog meat as a child in Indonesia. Former candidate Rick Santorum overwrought about man-dog love. Is this what the US Presidential race has turned into -- one dog attack after another? Back in
SAS Dress Code In addition to providing great software for forecasting (and business analytics in general), SAS is also renowned as a great place to work. (See #1, #1, and #3 rankings the past three years in the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For.) Part of this greatness is due
Pet lovers do the most incredible things. My friend Grace told me she trained her pet rabbit to walk on a leash. I said, "That's amazing Grace -- I never heard of such a thing!!! I thought rabbits could only hop." Rest assured there are no dogs (cats or rabbits
The Winter 2012 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman's preview: --------------------------- Our last two issues featured Steve Morlidge’s Guiding Principles for managing an organization’s forecasting process. You can see the summary table of these principles on page 31. With this issue, we continue their development
Paul Goodwin's Hot New Research column is a must-read in each issue of Foresight. The current column, "High on Complexity, Low on Evidence: Are Advanced Forecasting Methods Always as Good as They Seem?" ends with this sage advice: If the name of a method contains more words than the number of observations that
