Saturday, November 28, 2009

Exponential Smoothing

Someone mentioned a method to get an optimal value for parameter α in the exponential smoothing algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_smoothing). Looking at http://shazam.econ.ubc.ca/intro/expsmth1.htm this probably very often gives α=1. On pure intuition, I suspect this has something to do with the missing constant term in the corresponding ARIMA(0,1,1) model. In GAMS we can reproduce this as:

$ontext

  
GAMS code to reproduce
  
http://shazam.econ.ubc.ca/intro/expsmth1.htm

$offtext

sets
   t
/1931*1960/
   t1(t)
/1931*1959/
;

parameter sales(t) /
    
1931   1806
    
1932   1644
    
1933   1814
    
1934   1770
    
1935   1518
    
1936   1103
    
1937   1266
    
1938   1473
    
1939   1423
    
1940   1767
    
1941   2161
    
1942   2336
    
1943   2602
    
1944   2518
    
1945   2637
    
1946   2177
    
1947   1920
    
1948   1910
    
1949   1984
    
1950   1787
    
1951   1689
    
1952   1866
    
1953   1896
    
1954   1684
    
1955   1633
    
1956   1657
    
1957   1569
    
1958   1390
    
1959   1387
    
1960   1289
/;


variables
  f(t)
  sse
  w
;

w.lo = 0.0;
w.up = 1.0;
w.l  = 0.8;


equations
  deff(t)
  defsse
;

deff(t).. f(t) =e= sales(t)$(
ord(t)=1) +
                   [w*sales(t)+(1-w)*f(t-1)]$(
ord(t)>1);

defsse.. sse =e=
sum(t1(t),sqr(f(t)-sales(t+1)));


model m/all/;
solve m minimizing sse using nlp;

parameter result; 
result(
'opt','w') = w.l; 
result(
'opt','SSE') = sse.l;


set i/i1*i4/;
parameters wx(i) /
 
i1 0.8
 
i2 0.6
 
i3 0.4
 
i4 0.2
 
/;
loop(i,
  w.fx = wx(i);
 
solve m minimizing sse using nlp;
  result(i,
'w') = w.l;
  result(i,
'SSE') = sse.l;
);
display result;

Indeed this gives the following result:

----     90 PARAMETER result 

              w         SSE

opt       1.000 1222283.000
i1        0.800 1405768.565
i2        0.600 1761367.108
i3        0.400 2421085.784
i4        0.200 3570106.711

Note: the initial value for w (w.l  = 0.8;) is important. If we leave that statement out, CONOPT will not be able to move w away from its default initial value of zero.

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