Adaptive Dynamic Model Averaging with an Application to House Price Forecasting

Abstract

Dynamic model averaging (DMA) combines the forecasts of a large number of dynamic linear models (DLMs) to predict the future value of a time series. The performance of DMA critically depends on the appropriate choice of two forgetting factors. The first of these controls the speed of adaptation of the coefficient vector of each DLM, while the second enables time variation in the model averaging stage. In this paper we develop a novel, adaptive dynamic model averaging (ADMA) methodology. The proposed methodology employs a stochastic optimisation algorithm that sequentially updates the forgetting factor of each DLM, and uses a state-of-the-art non-parametric model combination algorithm from the prediction with expert advice literature, which offers finite-time performance guarantees. An empirical application to quarterly UK house price data suggests that ADMA produces more accurate forecasts than the benchmark autoregressive model, as well as competing DMA specifications.