In separate articles, Wader and Moon comment on Ian Watson-Jones' article (issue 11 of Foresight) on overcoming challenges in operational forecast projects. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2008

Organizations often seek benchmarks to judge the success of their forecasts. Reliable benchmarks would allow the company or agency to see if it has improved upon industry standards and to evaluate whether investment of additional resources in forecasting would be money well spent. But can the...

Prediction markets are being used to group individual opinions into collective judgment. Experimental prediction markets have improved on existing techniques for forecasting political elections and have been implemented in major corporations, such as Intel and Eli Lilly. Prediction markets have...

Just like Harry Potter and Starbucks, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning seems to be everywhere. This new book by Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris is often assigned as motivational reading for analysts who need a pep talk on the benefits of quantitative analysis. The 9th issue...

In this software column, the authors review Version 5.0 of Forecast Pro Unlimited (FPU), a Windows-based product developed by Business Forecast Systems, Inc. (BFS). The program is a successor to the Forecast Pro Batch system, which has been on the market for more than a decade. Compared to...

In issue 11 of Foresight, Stephen Kolassa and Robert Rieg gave their perceptions of shortcomings in surveys of forecast accuracy, referring to a 2006 longitudinal study by McCarthy et al. Here McCarthy and her fellow authors reply and also take up the question of the wisdom of benchmarking...

Forecasting for products with short life cycles is a well-known challenge. Jerry, Matthew, and Fereydoon describe an approach they developed to forecast printer demand at Hewlett-Packard. The approach has two components: one, which they call the automatic Product Life Cycle (PLC) method, is...

It’s been said that forecasting is the second-oldest profession. From the Greek oracles to computer models, the new book by David Orrell – The Future of Everything: The Science of Prediction – offers a thorough recounting of forecasting past and some intriguing forecasts for the rest of...

As a follow-up to their Summer 2008 article in Foresight, Jones and Kuzan present a table of 13 regression model forecasts of the major-party vote in the U.S. presidential election. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2008

Working as a team for the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Southern Maine, Bruce, James, Lindsey, Brooks and Joseph created a forecasting system for a large retail chain. Their base model uses the ARIMA methodology of Box and Jenkins, but the team has extended ARIMA...