This paper examines a strategy for structuring one type of domain knowledge for use in extrapolation. It does so by representing information about causality and using this domain knowledge to select and combine forecasts. We use five categories to express causal impacts upon trends: Growth,...

A substantial effort has been devoted to agricultural forecasting over the past half century. Allen's quantitative review provides a powerful way to examine that research. The quantitative review (or "meta-analysis" as it is commonly called since. Glass (1976)) is a formal study of studies....

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...

Opinion polling procedures allow for reasonable inferences about attitude changes. We examined this contention using surveys about the nomination of Clarence Thomas. In this situation, prior theory allowed us to predict the direction of changes, surveys had been conducted by a number of...

Clements and Hendry (1993) proposed the Generalized Forecast Error Second Moment (GFESM) as an improvement to the Mean Square Error in comparing forecasting performance across data series. They based their conclusion on the fact that rankings based on GFESM remain unaltered if the series are...

Fildes, Hibon, Makridakis and Meade (1998), which will be referred to as FHMM, extends two important published papers. The idea of taking findings from each study and testing them against the data used in the other study is a good one. Such replications and extensions are important in the effort...

Research on forecasting is extensive and includes many studies that have tested alternative methods in order to determine which ones are most effective. We review this evidence in order to provide guidelines for forecasting for marketing. The coverage includes intentions, Delphi, role playing,...

Rule-based forecasting (RBF) uses rules to combine forecasts from simple extrapolation methods. Weights for combining the rules use statistical and domain-based features of time series. RBF was originally developed, tested, and validated only on annual data. For the M3-Competition, three major...

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...