Combining Forecasting Procedures: Some Theoretical Results

We study some methods of combining procedures for forecasting a continuous random variable. Statistical risk bounds under the square error loss are obtained under mild distributional assumptions on the future given the current outside information and the past observations. The risk bounds show that the combined forecast automatically achieves the best performance among the candidate procedures up to a constant factor and an additive penalty term. In term of the rate of convergence, the combined forecast performs as well as if one knew which candidate forecasting procedure is the best in advance. Empirical studies suggest combining procedures can sometimes improve forecasting accuracy compared to the original procedures. Risk bounds are derived to theoretically quantify the potential gain and price for linearly combining forecasts for improvement. The result supports the empirical nding that it is not automatically a good idea to combine forecasts. A blind combining can degrade performance dramatically due to the undesirable large variability in estimating the best combining weights. An automated combining method is shown in theory to achieve a balance between the potential gain and the complexity penalty (the price for combining); to take advantage (if any) of sparse combining; and to maintain the best performance (in rate) among the candidate forecasting procedures if linear or sparse combining does not help.