Single-Equation Forecasts Wizard

The Single-Equation Forecasts Wizard can generate forecasts or simulations for a single equation. Selecting Single-Equation Forecasts from the Time Series Menu brings up something like the following dialog box:

This Wizard generates a UFORECAST instruction that does the forecasting or simulation. The Wizard provides the following fields:

Equation

Use this field to select the equation you want to forecast. The default is Last Regression (which is used here), which will forecast the last regression estimated using LINREG or similar instructions. You can use the drop-down list to select from any of the equations currently available in memory. These are normally created using the DEFINE option on an estimation instruction or Wizard.

Action

This field selects the type of forecasting that will be done. The default is "Dynamic (Out-of-Sample)", where forecasted values will be used as lagged values for subsequent forecast periods. The other choices are "Static (In-Sample)" forecasting, "Random (Normal) Simulation", and "Bootstrap Simulation". See UFORECAST for more on these choices.

Forecasts to

You can use this field to save the forecasts to a new or existing series. Here, we're saving them to series RHAT.

Std Errors to

You can use this field to save the standard errors of forecast to a new or existing series.

Forecast Start and End

You can use these fields to specify the range of entries for which you wish to compute forecasts.

Steps

As an alternative to using the Start and End fields, you can use the Steps field to indicate the number of steps (periods) for which you wish to compute forecasts. If you only specify a value for Steps, forecasting will begin with the first period after the end of the most recent estimation range. If you prefer, you can use the Start field to specify a different starting period (leaving the End field blank).

In the dialog above, the forecasts will be done for the first 12 periods out of sample.

Print/Show

Use this field to display the forecasts to the Output window ("To Output"), to a new spreadsheet-style window ("To Separate Window"), or to suppress the displayed output ("None"). If you choose "To Separate Window", a Window Title field appears that you can use to enter a title for the window.