โ Scribed by Douglas Wood
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Book Reviews 321 planning, and portfolio selection is particularly thorough.
For the researcher, the listings of comparisons among alternative forecasting methods should be valuable. One can choose any major forecasting method and find references which compare the effectiveness of other methods. For example, some sixty comparisons are listed between ARIMA methods and one or more of the following: autoregressive, causal, causal (simultaneous systems), decomposition, distributed lag, exponential smoothing, judgmental, and other. I found that many of these comparisons were not evident from the titles or abstracts of the papers, which reflects the high-quality research that went into this bibliography.
Academic users of this bibliography will be able to spice up their lectures with some of the more exotic references listed. Some good classroom examples that I found were papers on forecasting productivity in the Israeli diamond industry (good results), the population of coloured foxes in Labrador (also good), and earthquakes (shaky results).
Although the author does not give an evaluation of any reference, some are labelled either basic or advanced according to mathematical complexity. Basic references can be used by beginners in the field. Articles labelled as advanced are considered to have little general value, because of their inaccessibility. I checked a number of these labels and found that I agreed with most. I also found that labels were assigned only in extreme cases. Numerous difficult papers on such topics as spectral analysis and statistical testing of simultaneous equations models are not regarded as advanced. I expect that the average user will find that any paper that did get an advanced label is quite incomprehensible.
Most bibliographies are seldom updated. However, Fildes intends to publish periodic updates through the Manchester Business School. He also intends a small expansion of journal coverage.
In conclusion, this is a unique reference work which should help unify the field of forecasting.
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