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I am trying to compare the forecast accuracy of a number of methods using MAPE across different commodity markets, such as corn, wheat, soybeans, coffee, cotton. Obviously the relative MAPE’s area impacted by the relative volatilities of each commodity: a high MAPE for wheat may simply reflect a volatile market, not necessarily a poor forecast.

I am wondering how to correct for this: some kind of vol-adjusted MAPE I suppose, but I cannot find any literature on this. Alternatively, I was thinking of comparing the MAPE of a certain forecast method with the MAPE of a naïve forecast…this should also correct for the vol difference somewhat, I suppose.

Any further suggestions/comments are greatly appreciated.

Alex16
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1 Answers1

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I'm not aware of any measures that directly incorporates volatility, in order to enable comparison across. I would also question the relevance of directly comparing accuracy measures across like that, as the accuracy would depend - as you also points out - on the volatility/signal-to-noise ratio of the time series.

I approach a problem like this by what you also suggest - create a naïve forecast, and have that as the lowest acceptable accuracy for that series, and also an initial measure of the forecastability of the series.

Note: i follow the definition of a naïve forecast as: one which is a very simple forecast model, could be naive1, naive2, moving average or combination of those - where no further work needs to be done on parameters.

Try to have a look at the work of Michael Gilliland on FVA for inspiration

Steffen Jensen
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