Review of “Forecasting in Social Settings: The State of the Art” by Makridakis et al
30/Oct/19 17:54
In our course on Strategic Risk Management and Governance, we note the very substantial challenge of forecasting the future behavior of complex adaptive systems made up of human beings and their organizations. There are many reasons for this, including:
Taken together, these factors usually cause the accuracy of forecasts of complex adaptive system behavior to exponentially decline as the time horizon lengthens.
Given this background, we read the new paper by Makridakis and his colleagues with great interest.
At the outset, the authors clearly state that, “although forecasting in the physical sciences can attain amazing levels of accuracy, such is not the case in social contexts, where practically all predictions are uncertain, and a good number can be unambiguously wrong.”
There are a number of reasons for this. “First, there is usually a limited theoretical basis for presenting a causal or underlying mechanism” for the target variable being forecasted. “Thus we rely on statistical approximations that roughly describe what we observe, but may not represent a causal [process].” Second, “despite the deluge of data that is available today, much of this information does not concern what we want to forecast directly…Third, what we are trying to forecast is often affected by the forecasts themselves…Such feedback does not occur in weather forecasts…For these reasons, social science forecasts are unlikely to ever be as accurate as forecasts in the physical sciences, and the potential for improvements in accuracy is somewhat limited.”
The authors also note that when it comes to forecasting social systems, “unless uncertainty is expressed clearly and unambiguously, forecasting is not far removed from fortune-telling. However, uncertainty about judgmental forecasts of social system behavior is likely to be “underestimated greatly for two reasons.”
“First, our attitude to extrapolating in a linear fashion from the present to the future, and second, our fear of the unknown and our psychological need to reduce the anxiety associated with such a fear by believing we can control the future by predicting it accurately.”
Use of statistical instead of judgmental forecasting models improves the treatment of uncertainty, but this approach is far from perfect. The authors claim that, “there are at least three reasons for standard statistical models’ underestimations of the uncertainty:”
The paper also includes sections on different types of uncertainty, the challenges of incorporating causality into forecasting models, and the difficulty of predicting one off and extreme events.
In sum, the authors have produced an excellent (and extensively referenced) overview of the current state of the art of forecasting in social settings.
- Agents pursue multiple goals, with different incentives and priorities, and may change their goals and priorities over time as the system evolves;
- When deciding on actions to achieve their goals, agents differ in terms of the range of experiences they can draw on, and their cognitive ability to reason multiple time steps ahead about the likely consequences of their actions;
- Agents differ in their perceptions of the environment, and their beliefs about the future;
- Agents differ in the structure of their social networks, which also evolve over time (more technically, the data generating process in complex adaptive systems is non-stationary, which reduced the usefulness of historical results as a guide to future outcomes);
- Agents decide on their actions based not only on rational calculation, but also on their emotional reactions to competing narratives as well as the potential social impacts of their decisions;
- Agents differ in their desire to conform to the beliefs and copy the actions of other members of their group, with the latter typically increasing with the level of perceived uncertainty;
- Social feedback loops can produce emergent non-linear collective phenomena like herding, fads, booms and busts. These extreme events have been extremely hard to consistently forecast.
Taken together, these factors usually cause the accuracy of forecasts of complex adaptive system behavior to exponentially decline as the time horizon lengthens.
Given this background, we read the new paper by Makridakis and his colleagues with great interest.
At the outset, the authors clearly state that, “although forecasting in the physical sciences can attain amazing levels of accuracy, such is not the case in social contexts, where practically all predictions are uncertain, and a good number can be unambiguously wrong.”
There are a number of reasons for this. “First, there is usually a limited theoretical basis for presenting a causal or underlying mechanism” for the target variable being forecasted. “Thus we rely on statistical approximations that roughly describe what we observe, but may not represent a causal [process].” Second, “despite the deluge of data that is available today, much of this information does not concern what we want to forecast directly…Third, what we are trying to forecast is often affected by the forecasts themselves…Such feedback does not occur in weather forecasts…For these reasons, social science forecasts are unlikely to ever be as accurate as forecasts in the physical sciences, and the potential for improvements in accuracy is somewhat limited.”
The authors also note that when it comes to forecasting social systems, “unless uncertainty is expressed clearly and unambiguously, forecasting is not far removed from fortune-telling. However, uncertainty about judgmental forecasts of social system behavior is likely to be “underestimated greatly for two reasons.”
“First, our attitude to extrapolating in a linear fashion from the present to the future, and second, our fear of the unknown and our psychological need to reduce the anxiety associated with such a fear by believing we can control the future by predicting it accurately.”
Use of statistical instead of judgmental forecasting models improves the treatment of uncertainty, but this approach is far from perfect. The authors claim that, “there are at least three reasons for standard statistical models’ underestimations of the uncertainty:”
- “Probably the biggest factor is that model uncertainty is not taken into account. The prediction intervals are produced under the assumption that the model is ‘‘correct’’, which clearly is never the case.” The authors note that combining forecasts made using different models reduces this uncertainty.
- “Even if the model is specified correctly, the parameters must be estimated, and also the parameter uncertainty is rarely accounted for in time series forecasting models.” However, techniques like Monte Carlo simulation allow parameter uncertainty to be made explicit.
- “Most prediction intervals are produced under the assumption of Gaussian [normally distributed] errors. When this assumption is not correct, the prediction interval coverage will usually be underestimated, especially when the errors have a fat-tailed distribution [as is often the case in complex adaptive systems, which tend to produce outcomes that follow a Pareto/power law rather than a normal/bell curve distribution].”
The paper also includes sections on different types of uncertainty, the challenges of incorporating causality into forecasting models, and the difficulty of predicting one off and extreme events.
In sum, the authors have produced an excellent (and extensively referenced) overview of the current state of the art of forecasting in social settings.
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