M5 Conference Overview

Why you must attend the M5 Conference

The findings of the M5 Competition will be presented in the M5 Conference that will elaborate on the wining methods, their practical implications as well as how they can benefit business and other organizations in their effort to improve forecasting accuracy and correctly assess uncertainty.

The M5 Conference Program will include distinguished speakers from the major software/technology companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber and SAS) as well as known academics from top-level universities. It features the presentation of the three most accurate methods of the M5 Competition personally by their developers who also discuss how their methods can be implemented by others, as their code is available free in GitHub. The conference covers all critical aspects of forecasting, including combining methods and introducing judgmental adjustments, paying special emphasis on the comparison of Machine Learning and Statistical forecasting methods as well as the assessment of uncertainty. Additionally, the conference provides an excellent opportunity for networking and discussing the latest advances in forecasting by world-renowned experts.

Finally, Nassim Nicholas Taleb will deliver a keynote address discussing uncertainty in forecasting and Spyros Makridakis will present the major findings of the M5 Competition and discusses how organizations can benefit by such findings in order to improve the accuracy of their predictions and assess their uncertainty more realistically.

Who should attend the M5 Conference?

• Professionals working in companies or non-profit organizations in jobs that involve preparing forecasts and estimating uncertainty
• Financial managers who prepare their firms budget and the financial requirements for their firms
• Government officials requiring to predict receipts and expenses
• Hedge fund and other managers need to predict stock and other market variables
• Production managers requiring forecasts for their production planning activities
• Inventory managers who must predict the demand for large number of items to figure out optimal inventory levels and reordering points
• Logistics and transportation managers whose scheduling tasks need forecasts
• Academics teaching forecasting and related courses
• Students interested in forecasting for their courses or for their research