Recommendation: Statistical and Machine Learning forecasting methods: Concerns and ways forward

Steve Simon

2018/04/03

At first glance, you might think that this article looks like a vindication of traditional statistics. Classical time series models (methods that were available in the 1960’s) outperform newer machine language forecasting models. Then, you might worry that the comparisons were unfair. But neither viewpoint is accurate. The classical time series models have certain structural advantages for certain types of problems, but you might be better off with machine learning if you use classical time series as a preprocessing step, such as de-seasonalizing your data. If nothing else, this article provides a nice overview of some of the major machine learning methods.

Makridakis S, Spiliotis E, Assimakopoulos V (2018) Statistical and Machine Learning forecasting methods: Concerns and ways forward. PLoS ONE 13(3): e0194889. Available at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194889.