We assessed three important criteria of forecastability—simplicity, certainty, and variability. Climate is complex due to many causal variables and their variable interactions. There is uncertainty about causes, effects, and data. Using evidence-based (scientific) forecasting principles, we...

Those making environmental decisions must not only characterize the present, they must also forecast the future. They must do so for at least two reasons. First, if a no-action alternative is pursued, they must consider whether current trends will be favorable or unfavorable in the future....

We consider how judgment and statistical methods should be integrated for time-series forecasting. Our review of published empirical research identified 47 studies, all but four published since 1985. Five procedures were identified: revising judgment; combining forecasts; revising...

The prevalence of faulty citations impedes the growth of scientific knowledge. Faulty citations include omissions of relevant papers, incorrect references, and quotation errors that misreport findings. We discuss key studies in these areas. We then examine citations to “Estimating...

Individuals and organizations have operated for hundreds of years by planning and forecasting in an intuitive manner. It was not until the 1950s that formal approaches became popular. Since then, such approaches have been used by business, government, and nonprofit organizations. Advocates of...

Purchase intentions are routinely used to forecast sales of existing products and services. While past studies have shown that intentions are predictive of sales, they have only examined the absolute accuracy of intentions, not their accuracy relative to other forecasting methods. For example,...

We drew upon findings from the diffusion literature to assess the prospects for the diffusion of expert systems in forecasting. Forecasters judged potential adoption of expert systems in relation to two techniques that had been widely adopted in the past, Box-Jenkins and scenarios. They also...

Rule-Based Forecasting (RBF) is an expert system that uses judgment to develop and apply rules for combining extrapolations. The judgment comes from two sources, forecasting expertise and domain knowledge. Forecasting expertise is based on more than a half century of research. Domain knowledge...

Judgmental bootstrapping is a type of expert system. It translates an experts' rules into a quantitative model by regressing the experts' forecasts against the information that he used. Bootstrapping models apply an experts' rules consistently, and many studies have shown that decisions and...

Role playing can be used to forecast decisions, such as “how will our competitors respond if we lower our prices?” In role playing, an administrator asks people to play roles and uses their “decisions” as forecasts. Such an exercise can produce a realistic simulation of the interactions...