CEIS - CENTRE FOR ECONOMICS AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

This paper develops methods for combining density forecasts which accommodate stochastic dependence between different forecasters' predictions. Previous work combining density forecasts, using so-called "opinion pools", has essentially ignored dependence. The proposed basis for modelling the dependence among different forecasters' density forecasts is a re-calibration function, based on the probability integral transforms of the component densities. This reduces to a copula function in a special case. We explore the properties of various approximations to the re-calibration function in Monte-Carlo simulations and in an application density forecasting UK GDP growth. We find that the recalibrated opinion pool can deliver more accurate densities than traditional linear and logarithmic opinion pools.

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