Expert Opinions About Extrapolation and the Mystery of the Overlooked Discontinuities

Abstract

We report on the opinions of 49 forecasting experts on guidelines for extrapolation methods. They agreed that seasonality, trend, aggregation, and discontinuities were key features to use for selecting extrapolation methods. The strong agreement about the importance of discontinuities was surprising because this topic has been largely ignored in the forecasting literature.

Keywords: Discontinuities, Forecasting guidelines, Selection criteria, Time series features