Related papers: Revisiting Francis Galton's Forecasting Competitio…
An informal and elementary introduction to probability scoring and forecast verification and improvement, slightly extended from Significance 22:3(2025)16, which might be useful for less mathematical readers as a prologue to the classic…
Forecast combinations have been widely applied in the last few decades to improve forecasting. Estimating optimal weights that can outperform simple averages is not always an easy task. In recent years, the idea of using time series…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
Competing styles of Statistical Mechanics have been introduced as practical succedaneous to the conventional well established Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics, when in the use of the latter the researcher is impaired in his/her…
Competitions play an invaluable role in the field of forecasting, as exemplified through the recent M4 competition. The competition received attention from both academics and practitioners and sparked discussions around the…
Forecast combinations have flourished remarkably in the forecasting community and, in recent years, have become part of the mainstream of forecasting research and activities. Combining multiple forecasts produced from single (target) series…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
Forecast combination and model averaging have become popular tools in forecasting and prediction, both of which combine a set of candidate estimates with certain weights and are often shown to outperform single estimates. A data-driven…
We initiate the study of incentive-compatible forecasting competitions in which multiple forecasters make predictions about one or more events and compete for a single prize. We have two objectives: (1) to incentivize forecasters to report…
Forecasting competitions are the equivalent of laboratory experimentation widely used in physical and life sciences. They provide useful, objective information to improve the theory and practice of forecasting, advancing the field,…
Forecasters often use common information and hence make common mistakes. We propose a new approach, Factor Graphical Model (FGM), to forecast combinations that separates idiosyncratic forecast errors from the common errors. FGM exploits the…
I discuss recent developments in the determination of parton distributions from global fits. I concentrate on the errors associated with these parton distributions and with the physical quantities which are determined in terms of them. I…
This paper considers the use of observed and predicted match statistics as inputs to forecasts of the outcomes of football matches. It is shown that, were it possible to know the match statistics in advance, highly informative forecasts of…
An inequality, recently proposed by Franson [Phys. Rev. A 54, 3808 (1996)] is analyzed and improved. The inequality connects the change of the expectation value of an observable with the uncertainty of this observable. A strict bound on the…
Forecast combination has been proven to be a very important technique to obtain accurate predictions. In many applications, forecast errors exhibit heavy tail behaviors for various reasons. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, little has been…
It is often reported in forecast combination literature that a simple average of candidate forecasts is more robust than sophisticated combining methods. This phenomenon is usually referred to as the "forecast combination puzzle". Motivated…
Forecast combination -- the aggregation of individual forecasts from multiple experts or models -- is a proven approach to economic forecasting. To date, research on economic forecasting has concentrated on local combination methods, which…
Forecast combination methods have traditionally emphasized symmetric loss functions, particularly squared error loss, with equally weighted combinations often justified as a robust approach under such criteria. However, these justifications…
This paper proposes corrected forecast combinations when the original combined forecast errors are serially dependent. Motivated by the classic Bates and Granger (1969) example, we show that combined forecast errors can be strongly…
In forecasting competitions, the traditional mechanism scores the predictions of each contestant against the outcome of each event, and the contestant with the highest total score wins. While it is well-known that this traditional mechanism…