gwern comments on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Morendil 09 October 2012 03:49PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (108)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 10 October 2012 05:33:32PM *  2 points [-]

Hewitt pointed out that in general, you could do better than most other forecasters by favoring the status quo outcome.

I vaguely recall some academic work showing this to be true, or more generally if you're predicting the variable X_t over time, the previous period's value tends to be a better predictor than more complicated models. Can anyone confirm/deny my memory? And maybe provide a citation?

Comment author: gwern 10 October 2012 07:00:45PM 4 points [-]

This is a theme of multiple papers in the 2001 anthology Principles of Forecasting (a PDF of which is findable online), to give a specific citation.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 10 October 2012 09:23:07PM 0 points [-]

Thanks! That's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, and maybe remembering.