I spoke to our new crop of honours students this morning. Here are my slides, example files and links.   Managing References Mendeley Zotero Paperpile Data analysis and computation Download R Download Rstudio Online R tutorial R packages for time series R packages for econometrics R packages for finance Writing your ... [Read more...]

Last October I gave a 3-day masterclass on “Forecasting with R” in Eindhoven, Netherlands. There is a follow-up event planned for Tuesday 18 April 2017. It is particularly designed for people who attended the 3-day class, but if anyone else wants to attend they would be welcome. Please register here if you ... [Read more...]

In what is now a roughly annual event, the forecast package has been updated on CRAN with a new version, this time 8.0. A few of the more important new features are described below. Check residuals A common task when building forecasting models is to check that the residuals satisfy some ... [Read more...]

From my email today You use an illustration of a seasonal arima model: ARIMA(1,1,1)(1,1,1)4 I would like to simulate data from this process then fit a model… but I am unable to find any information as to how this can be conducted… if I set phi1, Phi1, theta1, and Theta1 ... [Read more...]

I’ve added a couple of new functions to the forecast package for R which implement two types of cross-validation for time series. K-fold cross-validation for autoregression The first is regular k-fold cross-validation for autoregressive models. Although cross-validation is sometimes not valid for time series models, it does work for ... [Read more...]

Someone sent me some questions by email, and I decided to answer some of them here. How important is it that I know and understand the underlying mathematical framework to forecasting methods? I understand conceptually how most of them work, but I feel as if I may benefit from truly ... [Read more...]

The data used in the tourism forecasting competition, discussed in Athanasopoulos et al (2011), have been made available in the Tcomp package for R. The objects are of the same format as for Mcomp package containing data from the M1 and M3 competitions. Thanks to Peter Ellis for putting the package ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham’s popular R developer course is coming to Melbourne on 12-13 December 2016. Bookings can be made via Eventbrite. Hadley, of course, is the developer of the wonderful tidyverse set of R packages including ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, readr, purrr, tibble, and many more. He is the author of several ... [Read more...]

RStudio has been a life-changer for the way I work, and for how I teach data analysis. I still have a couple of minor frustrations with it, but they are slowly disappearing as RStudio adds features. I use dual monitors and I like to code on one monitor and have ... [Read more...]

The github page for the forecast package currently shows the following information Note the downloads figure: 264K/month. I know the package is popular, but that seems crazy. Also, the downloads figure on github only counts the downloads from the RStudio mirror, and ignores downloads from the other 125 mirrors around ... [Read more...]

I’ve been having discussions with colleagues and university administration about the best way for universities to manage home-grown software. The traditional business model for software is that we build software and sell it to everyone willing to pay. Very often, that leads to a software company spin-off that has ... [Read more...]

I prepared the following notes for a consulting client, and I thought they might be of interest to some other people too. Let denote the value of the time series at time , and suppose we wish to fit a trend with correlated errors of the form     where represents the possibly ... [Read more...]

It is a while since I last updated the CRAN version of the forecast package, so I uploaded the latest version (6.2) today. The github version remains the most up-to-date version and is already two commits ahead of the CRAN version. This update is mostly bug fixes and additional error traps. ... [Read more...]

I gave a seminar at Stanford today. Slides are below. It was definitely the most intimidating audience I’ve faced, with Jerome Friedman, Trevor Hastie, Brad Efron, Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes, David Donoho and John Chambers all present (and probably other famous names I’ve missed). I’ll be giving ... [Read more...]

Jane Frazier spoke at our research team meeting today on “Reproducibility in computational research”. We had a very stimulating and lively discussion about the issues involved. One interesting idea was that reproducibility is on a scale, and we can all aim to move further along the scale towards making our ... [Read more...]

I will be speaking at the Chinese R conference in Nanchang, to be held on 24–25 October, on “Forecasting Big Time Series Data using R”. Details (for those who can read Chinese) are at china-r.org. [Read more...]

I’m back in California for the next couple of weeks, and will give the following talk at Stanford and UC-Davis. Optimal forecast reconciliation for big time series data Time series can often be naturally disaggregated in a hierarchical or grouped structure. For example, a manufacturing company can disaggregate total ... [Read more...]

I’ve always struggled with using plotmath via the expression function in R for adding mathematical notation to axes or legends. For some reason, the most obvious way to write something never seems to work for me and I end up using trial and error in a loop with far ... [Read more...]

At the recent International Symposium on Forecasting, held in Riverside, California, Tillman Gneiting gave a great talk on “Evaluating forecasts: why proper scoring rules and consistent scoring functions matter”. It will be the subject of an IJF invited paper in due course. One of the things he talked about was ... [Read more...]

There are some tools that I use regularly, and I would like my research students and post-docs to learn them too. Here are some great online tutorials that might help. ggplot tutorial from Winston Chang Writing an R package from Karl Broman Rmarkdown from RStudio Shiny from RStudio git/github ... [Read more...]