Global combinations of expert forecasts

Yilin Qian, Ryan Thompson and Andrey Vasnev

No BAWP-2022-02, Working Papers from University of Sydney Business School, Discipline of Business Analytics

Abstract: Expert forecast combination—the aggregation of individual forecasts from multiple subject matter experts— is a proven approach to economic forecasting. To date, research in this area has exclusively concentrated on local combination methods, which handle separate but related forecasting tasks in isolation. Yet, it has been known for over two decades in the machine learning community that global methods, which exploit taskrelatedness, can improve on local methods that ignore it. Motivated by the possibility for improvement, this paper introduces a framework for globally combining expert forecasts. Through our framework, we develop global versions of several existing forecast combinations. To evaluate the efficacy of these new global forecast combinations, we conduct extensive comparisons using synthetic and real data. Our real data comparisons, which involve expert forecasts of core economic indicators in the Eurozone, are the first empirical evidence that the accuracy of global combinations of expert forecasts can surpass local combinations.

Keywords: Forecast combination; local forecasting; global forecasting; multi-task learning; European Central Bank; Survey of Professional Forecasters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-big, nep-eec and nep-for
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