IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/swe/wpaper/2017-10.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Conditionally Optimal Weights and Forward-Looking Approaches to Combining Forecasts

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher G. Gibbs

    (School of Economics, UNSW Business School, UNSW)

  • Andrey L. Vasnev

    (University of Sydney)

Abstract

In applied forecasting, there is a trade-off between in-sample fit and out-of-sample forecast accuracy. Parsimonious model specifications typically outperform richer model specifications. Consequently, there is often predictable information in forecast errors that is difficult to exploit. However, we show how this predictable information can be exploited in forecast combinations. In this case, optimal combination weights should minimize conditional mean squared error, or a conditional loss function, rather than the unconditional variance as in the commonly used framework of Bates and Granger (1969). We prove that our conditionally optimal weights lead to better forecast performance. The conditionally optimal weights support other forward-looking approaches to combining forecasts, where the forecast weights depend on the expected model performance. We show that forward-looking

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher G. Gibbs & Andrey L. Vasnev, 2017. "Conditionally Optimal Weights and Forward-Looking Approaches to Combining Forecasts," Discussion Papers 2017-10, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
  • Handle: RePEc:swe:wpaper:2017-10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://research.economics.unsw.edu.au/RePEc/papers/2017-10.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Orphanides, Athanasios & van Norden, Simon, 2005. "The Reliability of Inflation Forecasts Based on Output Gap Estimates in Real Time," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 37(3), pages 583-601, June.
    2. Raffaella Giacomini & Halbert White, 2006. "Tests of Conditional Predictive Ability," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 74(6), pages 1545-1578, November.
    3. Davies, Antony, 2006. "A framework for decomposing shocks and measuring volatilities derived from multi-dimensional panel data of survey forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 373-393.
    4. Raffaella Giacomini & Barbara Rossi, 2009. "Detecting and Predicting Forecast Breakdowns," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 76(2), pages 669-705.
    5. Issler, João Victor & Lima, Luiz Renato, 2009. "A panel data approach to economic forecasting: The bias-corrected average forecast," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 152(2), pages 153-164, October.
    6. Kenneth Wallis, 2011. "Combining forecasts - forty years later," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(1-2), pages 33-41.
    7. Carlos Capistr¡N & Allan Timmermann, 2009. "Disagreement and Biases in Inflation Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(2-3), pages 365-396, March.
    8. Croushore, Dean & Stark, Tom, 2001. "A real-time data set for macroeconomists," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 105(1), pages 111-130, November.
    9. West, Kenneth D, 1996. "Asymptotic Inference about Predictive Ability," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(5), pages 1067-1084, September.
    10. Zhang, Xiaomeng & Zhang, Xinyu, 2023. "Optimal model averaging based on forward-validation," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 237(2).
    11. Marcellino, Massimiliano & Stock, James H. & Watson, Mark W., 2006. "A comparison of direct and iterated multistep AR methods for forecasting macroeconomic time series," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 135(1-2), pages 499-526.
    12. Granziera, Eleonora & Sekhposyan, Tatevik, 2019. "Predicting relative forecasting performance: An empirical investigation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1636-1657.
    13. West, Kenneth D., 2006. "Forecast Evaluation," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 3, pages 99-134, Elsevier.
    14. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 2002. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 134-144, January.
    15. Jörg Breitung & Malte Knüppel, 2021. "How far can we forecast? Statistical tests of the predictive content," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(4), pages 369-392, June.
    16. Graham Elliott & Allan Timmermann, 2016. "Economic Forecasting," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10740.
    17. Timothy Cogley & Giorgio E. Primiceri & Thomas J. Sargent, 2010. "Inflation-Gap Persistence in the US," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(1), pages 43-69, January.
    18. Francis X. Diebold, 2015. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy, Twenty Years Later: A Personal Perspective on the Use and Abuse of Diebold-Mariano Tests," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(1), pages 1-1, January.
    19. Claeskens, Gerda & Magnus, Jan R. & Vasnev, Andrey L. & Wang, Wendun, 2016. "The forecast combination puzzle: A simple theoretical explanation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 754-762.
    20. Stark, Tom & Croushore, Dean, 2002. "Forecasting with a real-time data set for macroeconomists," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 24(4), pages 507-531, December.
    21. Montero-Manso, Pablo & Athanasopoulos, George & Hyndman, Rob J. & Talagala, Thiyanga S., 2020. "FFORMA: Feature-based forecast model averaging," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 86-92.
    22. Elliott, Graham & Gargano, Antonio & Timmermann, Allan, 2013. "Complete subset regressions," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 177(2), pages 357-373.
    23. Davies, Anthony & Lahiri, Kajal, 1995. "A new framework for analyzing survey forecasts using three-dimensional panel data," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 205-227, July.
    24. Timmermann, Allan, 2006. "Forecast Combinations," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 4, pages 135-196, Elsevier.
    25. Clark, Todd & McCracken, Michael, 2013. "Advances in Forecast Evaluation," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1107-1201, Elsevier.
    26. Radchenko, Peter & Vasnev, Andrey L. & Wang, Wendun, 2023. "Too similar to combine? On negative weights in forecast combination," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 18-38.
    27. Clark, Todd E. & West, Kenneth D., 2007. "Approximately normal tests for equal predictive accuracy in nested models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 138(1), pages 291-311, May.
    28. James H. Stock & Mark W.Watson, 2003. "Forecasting Output and Inflation: The Role of Asset Prices," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 41(3), pages 788-829, September.
    29. Capistrán, Carlos & Timmermann, Allan, 2009. "Forecast Combination With Entry and Exit of Experts," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 27(4), pages 428-440.
    30. Genre, Véronique & Kenny, Geoff & Meyler, Aidan & Timmermann, Allan, 2013. "Combining expert forecasts: Can anything beat the simple average?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 108-121.
    31. Wagner Piazza Gaglianone & João Victor Issler, 2014. "Microfounded Forecasting," Working Papers Series 372, Central Bank of Brazil, Research Department.
    32. Elliott, Graham & Timmermann, Allan, 2004. "Optimal forecast combinations under general loss functions and forecast error distributions," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 122(1), pages 47-79, September.
    33. Ang, Andrew & Bekaert, Geert & Wei, Min, 2007. "Do macro variables, asset markets, or surveys forecast inflation better?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(4), pages 1163-1212, May.
    34. Luiz Renato Lima & Fanning Meng, 2017. "Out‐of‐Sample Return Predictability: A Quantile Combination Approach," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(4), pages 877-895, June.
    35. Graham Elliott & Allan Timmermann, 2016. "Forecasting in Economics and Finance," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 8(1), pages 81-110, October.
    36. Clemen, Robert T., 1989. "Combining forecasts: A review and annotated bibliography," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 559-583.
    37. Carlos Capistrán & Allan Timmermann, 2009. "Disagreement and Biases in Inflation Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(2‐3), pages 365-396, March.
    38. Francis X. Diebold & Jose A. Lopez, 1995. "Forecast evaluation and combination," Research Paper 9525, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    39. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2007. "Why Has U.S. Inflation Become Harder to Forecast?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(s1), pages 3-33, February.
    40. Makridakis, Spyros & Spiliotis, Evangelos & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2018. "The M4 Competition: Results, findings, conclusion and way forward," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 802-808.
    41. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2010. "Modeling inflation after the crisis," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 173-220.
    42. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    43. David F. Hendry & Michael P. Clements, 2004. "Pooling of forecasts," Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 7(1), pages 1-31, June.
    44. Harvey, David & Leybourne, Stephen & Newbold, Paul, 1997. "Testing the equality of prediction mean squared errors," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 281-291, June.
    45. Aiolfi, Marco & Timmermann, Allan, 2006. "Persistence in forecasting performance and conditional combination strategies," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 135(1-2), pages 31-53.
    46. Faust, Jon & Wright, Jonathan H., 2013. "Forecasting Inflation," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2-56, Elsevier.
    47. Jeremy Smith & Kenneth F. Wallis, 2009. "A Simple Explanation of the Forecast Combination Puzzle," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 71(3), pages 331-355, June.
    48. G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), 2006. "Handbook of Economic Forecasting," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 1, number 1.
    49. Mark W. Watson & James H. Stock, 2004. "Combination forecasts of output growth in a seven-country data set," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(6), pages 405-430.
    50. Matsypura, Dmytro & Thompson, Ryan & Vasnev, Andrey L., 2018. "Optimal selection of expert forecasts with integer programming," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 165-175.
    51. Andrew Atkeson & Lee E. Ohanian, 2001. "Are Phillips curves useful for forecasting inflation?," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, vol. 25(Win), pages 2-11.
    52. Clements, Michael P & Hendry, David F, 1996. "Intercept Corrections and Structural Change," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 11(5), pages 475-494, Sept.-Oct.
    53. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2007. "Why Has U.S. Inflation Become Harder to Forecast?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(s1), pages 3-33, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. repec:zbw:bofrdp:2018_023 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Granziera, Eleonora & Sekhposyan, Tatevik, 2019. "Predicting relative forecasting performance: An empirical investigation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1636-1657.
    3. Granziera, Eleonora & Sekhposyan, Tatevik, 2019. "Predicting relative forecasting performance: An empirical investigation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1636-1657.
    4. Fossati, Sebastian, 2017. "Testing for State-Dependent Predictive Ability," Working Papers 2017-9, University of Alberta, Department of Economics.
    5. Radchenko, Peter & Vasnev, Andrey L. & Wang, Wendun, 2023. "Too similar to combine? On negative weights in forecast combination," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 18-38.
    6. Wei Qian & Craig A. Rolling & Gang Cheng & Yuhong Yang, 2019. "On the Forecast Combination Puzzle," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 7(3), pages 1-26, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rossi, Barbara, 2013. "Advances in Forecasting under Instability," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1203-1324, Elsevier.
    2. Christopher G. Gibbs, 2015. "Overcoming the Forecast Combination Puzzle: Lessons from the Time-Varying Effciency of Phillips Curve Forecasts of U.S. Inflation," Discussion Papers 2015-09, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    3. Barbara Rossi, 2019. "Forecasting in the presence of instabilities: How do we know whether models predict well and how to improve them," Economics Working Papers 1711, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jul 2021.
    4. Petropoulos, Fotios & Apiletti, Daniele & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios & Babai, Mohamed Zied & Barrow, Devon K. & Ben Taieb, Souhaib & Bergmeir, Christoph & Bessa, Ricardo J. & Bijak, Jakub & Boylan, Joh, 2022. "Forecasting: theory and practice," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 705-871.
      • Fotios Petropoulos & Daniele Apiletti & Vassilios Assimakopoulos & Mohamed Zied Babai & Devon K. Barrow & Souhaib Ben Taieb & Christoph Bergmeir & Ricardo J. Bessa & Jakub Bijak & John E. Boylan & Jet, 2020. "Forecasting: theory and practice," Papers 2012.03854, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2022.
    5. Szafranek, Karol, 2019. "Bagged neural networks for forecasting Polish (low) inflation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1042-1059.
    6. Faust, Jon & Wright, Jonathan H., 2013. "Forecasting Inflation," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2-56, Elsevier.
    7. Daniel Borup & Jonas N. Eriksen & Mads M. Kjær & Martin Thyrsgaard, 2024. "Predicting Bond Return Predictability," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 70(2), pages 931-951, February.
    8. Raffaella Giacomini & Barbara Rossi, 2013. "Forecasting in macroeconomics," Chapters, in: Nigar Hashimzade & Michael A. Thornton (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Empirical Macroeconomics, chapter 17, pages 381-408, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    9. Cotter, John & Eyiah-Donkor, Emmanuel & Potì, Valerio, 2023. "Commodity futures return predictability and intertemporal asset pricing," Journal of Commodity Markets, Elsevier, vol. 31(C).
    10. Chan, Felix & Pauwels, Laurent L., 2018. "Some theoretical results on forecast combinations," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 64-74.
    11. Antoine Mandel & Amir Sani, 2016. "Learning Time-Varying Forecast Combinations," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 16036, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    12. Todd E. Clark & Michael W. McCracken, 2010. "Averaging forecasts from VARs with uncertain instabilities," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(1), pages 5-29, January.
    13. Antoine Mandel & Amir Sani, 2017. "A Machine Learning Approach to the Forecast Combination Puzzle," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-01317974, HAL.
    14. Ang, Andrew & Bekaert, Geert & Wei, Min, 2007. "Do macro variables, asset markets, or surveys forecast inflation better?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(4), pages 1163-1212, May.
    15. Diebold, Francis X. & Shin, Minchul, 2019. "Machine learning for regularized survey forecast combination: Partially-egalitarian LASSO and its derivatives," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1679-1691.
    16. Timmermann, Allan, 2006. "Forecast Combinations," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 4, pages 135-196, Elsevier.
    17. Wang, Xiaoqian & Hyndman, Rob J. & Li, Feng & Kang, Yanfei, 2023. "Forecast combinations: An over 50-year review," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(4), pages 1518-1547.
    18. Croushore Dean, 2010. "An Evaluation of Inflation Forecasts from Surveys Using Real-Time Data," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 10(1), pages 1-32, May.
    19. Kourentzes, Nikolaos & Barrow, Devon & Petropoulos, Fotios, 2019. "Another look at forecast selection and combination: Evidence from forecast pooling," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 209(C), pages 226-235.
    20. Christopher G. Gibbs, 2017. "Forecast combination, non-linear dynamics, and the macroeconomy," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 63(3), pages 653-686, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Forecast combination; conditionally optimal weights; forecast combination puzzle; inflation; Phillips curve;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C18 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Methodolical Issues: General
    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:swe:wpaper:2017-10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Hongyi Li (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/senswau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.