General information on creating a forecast
object
Source: R/documentation-templates.R
as_forecast_doc_template.Rd
Process and validate a data.frame (or similar) or similar with forecasts
and observations. If the input passes all input checks, those functions will
be converted to a forecast
object. A forecast object is a data.table
with
a class forecast
and an additional class that depends on the forecast type.
The arguments observed
, predicted
, etc. make it possible to rename
existing columns of the input data to match the required columns for a
forecast object. Using the argument forecast_unit
, you can specify
the columns that uniquely identify a single forecast (and thereby removing
other, unneeded columns. See section "Forecast Unit" below for details).
Arguments
- data
A data.frame (or similar) with predicted and observed values. See the details section of for additional information on the required input format.
- forecast_unit
(optional) Name of the columns in
data
(after any renaming of columns) that denote the unit of a single forecast. Seeget_forecast_unit()
for details. IfNULL
(the default), all columns that are not required columns are assumed to form the unit of a single forecast. If specified, all columns that are not part of the forecast unit (or required columns) will be removed.- observed
(optional) Name of the column in
data
that contains the observed values. This column will be renamed to "observed".- predicted
(optional) Name of the column in
data
that contains the predicted values. This column will be renamed to "predicted".
Forecast unit
In order to score forecasts, scoringutils
needs to know which of the rows
of the data belong together and jointly form a single forecasts. This is
easy e.g. for point forecast, where there is one row per forecast. For
quantile or sample-based forecasts, however, there are multiple rows that
belong to a single forecast.
The forecast unit or unit of a single forecast is then described by the
combination of columns that uniquely identify a single forecast.
For example, we could have forecasts made by different models in various
locations at different time points, each for several weeks into the future.
The forecast unit could then be described as
forecast_unit = c("model", "location", "forecast_date", "forecast_horizon")
.
scoringutils
automatically tries to determine the unit of a single
forecast. It uses all existing columns for this, which means that no columns
must be present that are unrelated to the forecast unit. As a very simplistic
example, if you had an additional row, "even", that is one if the row number
is even and zero otherwise, then this would mess up scoring as scoringutils
then thinks that this column was relevant in defining the forecast unit.
In order to avoid issues, we recommend setting the forecast unit explicitly,
using the forecast_unit
argument. This will simply drop unneeded columns,
while making sure that all necessary, 'protected columns' like "predicted"
or "observed" are retained.