The Statistics Seminar speaker for March 18, 2015 will be Rebecca Killick from the University of Lancaster, UK.
Title: Forecasting Locally Stationary Time Series
Abstract: Within many fields forecasting is an important statistical tool. Traditional statistical techniques often assume stationarity of the past in order to produce accurate forecasts. For data arising from the energy sector and others, this stationarity assumption is often violated but forecasts still need to be produced.
This talk will highlight the potential issues when moving from forecasting stationary to nonstationary data and propose a new estimator, the local partial autocorrelation function, which will aid us in forecasting locally stationary data. We introduce the lpacf alongside associated theory and examples demonstrating its use as a modelling tool. Following this we illustrate the new estimator embedded within a forecasting method and show improved forecasting performance using this new technique.