Macroeconomic forecasts enable the policy-makers to foresee the future economic trends and take prompt measures to ensure longer economic growth and quicker economic recovery. Accurate and timely macroeconomic forecasts may also help the enterprises to make better long-term business strategies. Social media has a swift and sensitive response to economic dynamics through online news reports, int...

Betting on the most promising new ideas is key to creativity and innovation in organizations, but predicting the success of novel ideas can be difficult. To select the best ideas, creators and managers must excel at creative forecasting, the skill of predicting the outcomes of new ideas. Using both a field study of 339 professionals in the circus arts industry and a lab experiment, I examine th...

There is a marked gap between the demands on forecasting and the results that numerical forecasting techniques usually can provide. It is suggested that this gap can be closed by the implementation of experts' qualitative predictions into numerical forecasting systems. A formal analysis of these predictions can then be integrated into quantitative forecasts. In the framework of possibility theo...

Users’ visual attention is highly fragmented during mobile interactions but the erratic nature of these attention shifts currently limits attentive user interfaces to adapt after the fact, i.e. after shifts have already happened, thereby severely limiting the adaptation capabilities and user experience. To address these limitations, we study attention forecasting – the challenging task of predi...

In many applications, there are multiple time series that are hierarchically organised and can be aggregated at several different levels in groups based on products, geography or some other features. A common constraint is that forecasts of the disaggregated series need to add up to the forecasts of the aggregated series. This is known as "coherence". We develop a new reconciliation forecasting...

Purpose: Intermittent demand appears sporadically, with some time periods not even displaying any demand at all. Even so, such patterns constitute considerable proportions of the total stock in many industrial settings. Forecasting intermittent demand is a rather difficult task but of critical importance for corresponding cost savings. The current study examines the empirical outcomes of three ...

An accurate short-term forecast of product sales is vital for the smooth operation of modern supply chains, especially where the manufacture of complex products is outsourced internationally. As a vendor of enterprise computing products whose business model has long emphasized extensive outsourcing, Sun Microsystems Inc. has a keen interest in the accuracy of its product sales forecasts. Histor...

In this paper performance evaluation methodologies that have been applied in the analysis of parallel systems are reviewed together with the specific performance metrics. We concentrate on a few selected performance studies of parallel system components, i.e., processor, memory, interconnection network, input/output, and operating system. We demonstrate the utility of the performance evaluation...