The International Council of Shopping Centers, an industry trade group, published one of the most optimistic of the holiday reports so far, forecasting a 1percentt year-over-year sales increase in November and December for stores open at least a year.
But before presenting the methodology proposed for the irradiance forecast model, we outline the research done so far for forecasting irradiance using neural network approaches.
"So far, my forecast and the one on Intrade have been fairly close," he said.
So far, however, the forecasts made by FiveThirtyEight and other polling aggregators have been fairly accurate, which suggests that the forecasts may be underconfident and may err on the side of overestimating the true degree of uncertainty.
A Tesla executive, George Blankenship, declined to say how many electric cars the company had sold so far, but he forecast global sales of 20,000 for the Model S this year.
Oil and natural gas producers in the Gulf of Mexico were monitoring Felix, but had not evacuated offshore workers so far because its forecast track did not appear to threaten them.
CEO Marc Benioff predicted the company would reach its $10 billion run rate goal some time in 2018, and went so far as to forecast the company would reach $20 billion "faster than any other enterprise software company," (although he didn't give a timeline for that goal).
The record so far suggests these early forecasts were too bold.
GDP has exceeded forecasts so far this year, and in the second quarter was 3.1% larger than a year ago.
But the group of strategists and advisers polled for this column in January are so far sticking to their forecasts that equities are poised for growth this year.
