Nonparametric sequential prediction of time series

Abstract

Time series prediction covers a vast field of everyday statistical applications in medical, environmental and economic domains. In this paper, we develop nonparametric prediction strategies based on the combination of a set of ‘experts’ and show the universal consistency of these strategies under a minimum of conditions. We perform an in-depth analysis of real-world data sets and show that these nonparametric strategies are more flexible, faster and generally outperform ARMA methods in terms of normalised cumulative prediction error.