Autobox stands alone at the top of the 2008 Forecasting Competition

 Autobox stands alone at the top of Automated Forecasting Software in the "Daily Data" 2008 Forecasting Competition Click here to view

On the heels of our 1st and 2nd place finish in the last Neural Network Competition in 2006 on "Monthly data", we are very proud of our latest accomplishment. All other forecasts were NOT from automatic systems like Autobox, but rather handcrafted for each series one by one. Can you imagine trying to routinely rebuild all of your models/forecasts daily non automatically? Do you think you could get the job done in time?

Robert Fildes(former President of the ISF) and Sven Crone presented the results at the June 26, 2008, 28th International Symposium on Forecasting in Nice, France and the International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in Las Vegas July 15, 2008. The competition was sponsored by the University of Lancaster and focused on daily data. The most interesting result was the performance of Autobox which stood alone as the only automatic software package to achieve great results. All known forecasting software vendors were solicited and notably absent was our competition. Only one other vendor elected to submit their forecasts into the competition after reviewing the data.

  • 111 Complete Dataset - Autobox placed 17th
  • 11 Reduced Dataset(toughest datasets) - Autobox placed 12th

Congratulations to Gao and Sollacher at Siemens for winning the competition. It should also be noted that the Siemens software package costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and you would need the expertise that Gao and Sollacher's have and the time/effort to get an optimal result. Results are posted on the website http://www.neural-forecasting-competition.com/results.htm and then will be published in a special edition dedicated to this competition in The International Journal of Forecasting.

 
Go to top