Forecasting the Brent oil price : addressing time-variation in forecast performance; N°1735, September 2014

This paper demonstrates how the real-time forecasting accuracy of different Brent oil price forecast models changes over time. We find considerable instability in the performance of all models evaluated and argue that relying on average forecasting statistics might hide important information on a model`s forecasting properties. To address this instability, we propose a forecast combination approach to predict quarterly real Brent oil prices. A four-model combination (consisting of futures, risk-adjusted futures, a Bayesian VAR and a DGSE model of the oil market) predicts Brent oil prices more accurately than the futures and the random walk up to 11 quarters ahead, on average, and generates a forecast whose performance is remarkably robust over time. In addition, the model combination reduces the forecast bias and predicts the direction of the oil price changes more accurately than both benchmarks.