Forecast Accuracy Quotes

The Treasury has enough trouble with forecasts even when they are trying to get them right.

Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it's going to rain tomorrow.

Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.

It will be a vast boon to mankind when we learn to prophesy the precise dates when cycles of various kinds will reach definite stages.

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

I'm an economist, I do a lot of forecasting, and I'm probably one of the most successful forecasters in terms of very specific kinds of forecasts.

There is no way that we can predict the weather six months ahead beyond giving the seasonal average.

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

It is almost possible to predict one or two days in advance, within a rather broad range of probability, what the weather is going to be; it is even thought that it will not be impossible to publish daily forecasts, which would be very useful to soci.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

Economic forecasting has actually got pretty good over the years, though admittedly, we don't always get it right.

The federal government is starting to plan for climate change by making extended forecasts that can help people plan for extreme weather - because what can go wrong when you combine the efficiency of government with the accuracy of weathermen?

Whenever I see a forecast written out to two decimal places, I cannot help but wonder if there is a misunderstanding of the limitations of the data, and an illusion of precision.

If we're going to forecast the business cycle, surely it is a good idea to know the business cycle. Sounds reasonable, but it's not that easy.

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

All economic forecasts are subject to considerable uncertainty. There is always a wide range of plausible outcomes for important economic variables, including the federal funds rate.