CMAF FFT: Long-Term Forecasting for Policymaking with Structured Analogies

This is the second webinar in Season 2 of "Friday Forecasting Talks", hosted by Centre for Marketing Analytics and Forecasting of Lancaster University, UK.

-- Contents of this video --------------------------
00:00 - Introduction
00:44 - Start
03:45 - Horizon in economic forecasting
05:11 - Long term forecasting
08:33 - Factors and their impact
09:25 - Case study
12:00 - Research design
16:25 - Structured analogies
20:55 - Reference class forecasting
23:24 - kNN
24:46 - Real case results
27:55 - Analogies identified by experts
29:34 - Further results
33:30 - 20-years ahead forecasts
37:23 - Evaluating participants
40:10 - Elephants in the room
43:46 - Conclusions
44:30 - Remarks of Robert Fildes
50:50 - What makes a good long term forecast?
52:32 - How to evaluate long term forecasts?
54:00 - Long term forecasting in industry
55:00 - Planning and forecasting in long term
59:25 - Closing remarks

The abstract: We provide forecasts on how the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can reduce its dependency on the oil sector. This is a very timely quest, given the negative prices of oil in the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The forecasting task involves estimating the contribution of the top-5 sectors of the GDP in 20-years-time. The study involves 4 sequential experiments and 110 participants with increasing levels of expertise: novices (19), semi-experts (73), and experts (18). The first two experiments involved forecasting individually with Unaided Judgment and Structured Analogies; the third formed Interaction Groups. In these experiments, participants did not know for which country they produced forecasts; in the final experiment, we revealed the country name and rerun the third experiment. We demonstrate that the proposed forecasting framework can comprehensively identify areas of long-term GDP diversification, and inform policymaking; furthermore, it can quantify the contribution of each GDP sector to the economy.
Speaker: Prof. Konstantinos Nikolopoulos
Bio: Dr. Konstantinos (Kostas) Nikolopoulos is the Professor in Business Information Systems and Analytics at Durham University Business School. He is an Associate Editor of Oxford IMA "Journal of Management Mathematics" and the "Supply Chain Forum, an International Journal" (Taylor & Francis); he is also the Section Editor-In-Chief for the "Forecasting in Economics and Management" section in the MDPI open access journal "Forecasting". Konstantinos’ work has been consistently appearing in the International Journal of Forecasting (29 outputs) but also in journals for broader audiences including the Journal of Operations Management, the European Journal of Operational Research, and the Journal of Computer Information Systems.
Discussant: Prof. Robert Fildes