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Assessing Goodness of Fit for Verifying Probabilistic Forecasts

Author

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  • Tae-Ho Kang

    (School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
    Water Resources Management Research Center, K-Water Institute, Deajeon 34350, Korea)

  • Ashish Sharma

    (School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia)

  • Lucy Marshall

    (School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia)

Abstract

The verification of probabilistic forecasts in hydro-climatology is integral to their development, use, and adoption. We propose here a means of utilizing goodness of fit measures for verifying the reliability of probabilistic forecasts. The difficulty in measuring the goodness of fit for a probabilistic prediction or forecast is that predicted probability distributions for a target variable are not stationary in time, meaning one observation alone exists to quantify goodness of fit for each prediction issued. Therefore, we suggest an additional dissociation that can dissociate target information from the other time variant part—the target to be verified in this study is the alignment of observations to the predicted probability distribution. For this dissociation, the probability integral transformation is used. To measure the goodness of fit for the predicted probability distributions, this study uses the root mean squared deviation metric. If the observations after the dissociation can be assumed to be independent, the mean square deviation metric becomes a chi-square test statistic, which enables statistically testing the hypothesis regarding whether the observations are from the same population as the predicted probability distributions. An illustration of our proposed rationale is provided using the multi-model ensemble prediction for El Niño–Southern Oscillation.

Suggested Citation

  • Tae-Ho Kang & Ashish Sharma & Lucy Marshall, 2021. "Assessing Goodness of Fit for Verifying Probabilistic Forecasts," Forecasting, MDPI, vol. 3(4), pages 1-11, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jforec:v:3:y:2021:i:4:p:47-773:d:666151
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. James E. Matheson & Robert L. Winkler, 1976. "Scoring Rules for Continuous Probability Distributions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 22(10), pages 1087-1096, June.
    2. Gneiting, Tilmann & Raftery, Adrian E., 2007. "Strictly Proper Scoring Rules, Prediction, and Estimation," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 102, pages 359-378, March.
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