We propose three new practical methods of smoothing mortality rates (the procedure known in demography as graduation) over two dimensions: age and time. The first method uses bivariate thin plate splines. The second uses a similar procedure but with lasso-type regularization. The third method...

We propose a new forecasting strategy, called rectify, that seeks to combine the best properties of both the recursive and direct forecasting strategies. The rationale behind the rectify strategy is to begin with biased recursive forecasts and adjust them so they are unbiased and have smaller...

In this paper we challenge the traditional design used for forecasting competitions. We implement an online competition with a public leaderboard that provides instant feedback to competitors who are allowed to revise and resubmit forecasts. The results show that feedback significantly improves...

When independence is assumed, forecasts of mortality for subpopulations are almost always divergent in the long term. We propose a method for non-divergent or coherent forecasting of mortality rates for two or more subpopulations, based on functional principal components models of simple and...

We describe some fast algorithms for reconciling large collections of time series forecasts with aggregation constraints. The constraints arise due to the need for forecasts of collections of time series with hierarchical or grouped structures to add up in the same manner as the observed time...

Multi-step forecasts can be produced recursively by iterating a one-step model, or directly using a specific model for each horizon. Choosing between these two strategies is not an easy task since it involves a trade-off between bias and estimation variance over the forecast horizon. Using a...

We propose a new generic method ROPES (Regularized Optimization for Prediction and Estimation with Sparse data) for decomposing, smoothing and forecasting two-dimensional sparse data. In some ways, ROPES is similar to Ridge Regression, the LASSO, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and...

Exponential smoothing is one of the most popular forecasting methods. We present a method for bootstrap aggregation (bagging) of exponential smoothing methods. The bagging uses a Box-Cox transformation followed by an STL decomposition to separate the time series into trend, seasonal part, and...

In this paper, we focus on expensive multiobjective optimization problems and propose a method to predict an approximation of the Pareto optimal set using classification of sampled decision vectors as dominated or nondominated. The performance of our method, called EPIC, is demonstrated on a set...

One of the most widely used standard procedures for model evaluation in classification and regression is K-fold cross-validation (CV). However, when it comes to time series forecasting, because of the inherent serial correlation and potential non-stationarity of the data, its application is not...