Testing forecast accuracy of expectiles and quantiles with the extremal consistent loss functions

Forecast evaluations aim to choose an accurate forecast for making decisions by using loss functions. However, different loss functions often generate different ranking results for forecasts, which complicates the task of comparisons. In this paper, we develop statistical tests for comparing performances of forecasting expectiles and quantiles of a random variable under consistent loss functions. The test statistics are constructed with the extremal consistent loss functions of Ehm et al. (2016). The null hypothesis of the tests is that a benchmark forecast at least performs equally well as a competing one under all extremal consistent loss functions. It can be shown that if such a null holds, the benchmark will also perform at least equally well as the competitor under all consistent loss functions. Thus under the null, when different consistent loss functions are used, the result that the competitor does not outperform the benchmark will not be altered. We establish asymptotic properties of the proposed test statistics and propose to use the re-centered bootstrap to construct their empirical distributions. Through simulations, we show that the proposed test statistics perform reasonably well. We then apply the proposed method to evaluations of several different forecast methods. (C) 2020 International Institute of Forecasters. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper develops statistical tests for comparing performances of forecasting expectiles and quantiles under consistent loss functions. Through simulations, it is shown that the proposed method performs reasonably well for evaluating different forecast methods.