Forecasters often need to estimate uncertain quantities, but with limited time and resources. Decomposition is a method for dealing with such problems by breaking down (decomposing) the estimation task down into a set of components that can be more readily estimated, and then combining the...

We hypothesized that multiplicative decomposition would improve accuracy only in certain conditions. In particular, we expected it to help for problems involving extreme and uncertain values. We first reanalyzed results from two published studies. Decomposition improved accuracy for nine...