M3 competition
The third Makridakis Competition or M3 Competition (Makridakis and Hibon, 2000), was intended to both replicate and extend the features of the M and M2 Competitions, through the inclusion of more methods and participants (particularly researchers in the area of neural networks) and more time series. A total of 3003-time series was used. The paper documenting the results of the competition was published in the International Journal of Forecasting in 2000 and the raw data was made available on the International Institute of Forecasters website. According to the authors, the conclusions from the M3 Competition were similar to those from the earlier two ones.
The time series included yearly, quarterly, monthly, daily, and other data. In order to ensure that enough data was available to develop accurate forecasting model, minimum thresholds were set for the number of observations: 14 for yearly series, 16 for quarterly series, 48 for monthly series, and 60 for other series.
Initial Results
Time series were in the following domains: micro, industry, macro, finance, demographics, and other. Below is the number of time series based on the time frequencies and domains:
[table here]
The five measures used to evaluate the accuracy of different forecasts were: symmetric mean absolute percentage error (also known as symmetric MAPE), average ranking, median symmetric absolute percentage error (also known as median symmetric APE), percentage better, and median RAE.A number of other papers have been published with different analyses of the data set from the M3-Competition.
A copy describing the M3 Competition can be found here.
