Surveys show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) is the most widely used measure of forecast accuracy in businesses and organizations. It is also used to compare accuracy across multiple data sets, e.g. when choosing a forecasting method. Yet this metric systematically favours methods...

The World Happiness Report is published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and contains an international ranking of national average happiness, as measured by surveys of personal life evaluations. It also contains an analysis which tries to explain the happiness...

The advent of data envelopment analysis (DEA) enabled the measurement of efficiency to be extended to the case of multiple outputs. Prior to DEA we had the parametric approach based on multiple regression. We highlight some difficulties associated with these two approaches and present a hybrid...

We present a simple method for estimating a single relationship between multiple variables, which are all treated symmetrically i.e. there is no distinction between dependent and independent variables. This is of interest when estimating a law from observations in the natural sciences, although...

Surveys show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) is the most widely used measure of forecast accuracy in businesses and organizations. It is however, biased: When used to select among competing prediction methods it systematically selects those whose predictions are too low. This is...