Last week we were fortunate to have had one of the foremost statistical forecasters in the world, Dr. Rob Hyndman, join us for a Big Thinkers talk on the science of forecasting and prediction. Dr. Hyndman delivered a captivating seminar called, "Exploring the boundaries of predictability: what can we forecast, and when should we give up?"

In his talk, Dr. Hyndman discussed his research efforts to realize his long-term goal of understanding what models work best at predicting various types of time-series. Professor Hyndman demonstrated the aspects that make certain time-series more predictable than others by giving real-life examples based on his own research and work consulting for the Australian government. He explored different features that can be extracted from time-series and how they can be used to judge if something is predictable. Professor Hyndman also talked about his work with Yahoo Labs on Anomaly Detection and how extracted time-series features can be used for finding anomalies. While Dr. Hydnaman's goal of finding the right time-series model for a given dataset is still under active pursuit, his work on anomaly detection in collaboration with Yahoo Labs has already been open-sourced.

The event was broadcast live on our labs.yahoo.com homepage and viewers had the opportunity to ask questions and comment on our Twitter stream @YahooLabs as well as our Facebook page.

If you would like to learn what it takes to forecast and accurately predict the future, watch the full seminar here:

ABSTRACT