Category Archives: gold price forecasting

ARIMA models, artificial intelligence (AI), gold price forecasting, predictive analytics

More Blackbox Analysis – ARIMA Modeling in R

July 8, 2014 Clive Jones

Automatic forecasting programs are seductive. They streamline analysis, especially with ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) models. You have to know some basics – such as what the notation ARIMA(2,1,1) or ARIMA(p,d,q) means. But you can more or less sidestep the elaborate algebra – the higher reaches of equations written in backward shift operators – in favor of looking at results. Does the automatic ARIMA model selection predict out-of-sample, for example?

I have been exploring the Hyndman R Forecast package – and other contributors, such as George Athanasopoulos, Slava Razbash, Drew Schmidt, Zhenyu Zhou, Yousaf Khan, Christoph Bergmeir, and Earo Wang, should be mentioned.

A 76 page document lists the routines in Forecast, which you can download as a PDF file.

This post is about the routine auto.arima(.) in the Forecast package. This makes volatility modeling – a place where Box Jenkins or ARIMA modeling is relatively unchallenged – easier. The auto.arima(.) routine also encourages experimentation, and highlights the sharp limitations of volatility modeling in a way that, to my way of thinking, is not at all apparent from the extensive and highly mathematical literature on this topic.

Daily Gold Prices

I grabbed some data from FRED – the Gold Fixing Price set at 10:30 A.M (London time) in London Bullion Market, based in U.S. Dollars.

Now the price series shown in the graph above is a random walk, according to auto.arima(.).

In other words, the routine indicates that the optimal model is ARIMA(0,1,0), which is to say that after differencing the price series once, the program suggests the series reduces to a series of independent random values. The automatic exponential smoothing routine in Forecast is ets(.). Running this confirms that simple exponential smoothing, with a smoothing parameter close to 1, is the optimal model – again, consistent with a random walk.

Here’s a graph of these first differences.

But wait, there is a clustering of volatility of these first differences, which can be accentuated if we square these values, producing the following graph.

Now in a more or less textbook example, auto.arima(.) develops the following ARIMA model for this series

Thus, this estimate of the volatility of the first differences of gold price is modeled as a first order autoregressive process with two moving average terms.

Here is the plot of the fitted values.

Nice.

But of course, we are interested in forecasting, and the results here are somewhat more disappointing.

Basically, this type of model makes a horizontal line prediction at a certain level, which is higher when the past values have been higher.

This is what people in quantitative finance call “persistence” but of course sometimes new things happen, and then these types of models do not do well.

From my research on the volatility literature, it seems that short period forecasts are better than longer period forecasts. Ideally, you update your volatility model daily or at even higher frequencies, and it’s likely your one or two period ahead (minutes, hours, a day) will be more accurate.

Incidentally, exponential smoothing in this context appears to be a total fail, again suggesting this series is a simple random walk.

Recapitulation

There is more here than meets the eye.

First, the auto.arima(.) routines in the Hyndman R Forecast package do a competent job of modeling the clustering of higher first differences of the gold price series here. But, at the same time, they highlight a methodological point. The gold price series really has nonlinear aspects that are not adequately commanded by a purely linear model. So, as in many approximations, the assumption of linearity gets us some part of the way, but deeper analysis indicates the existence of nonlinearities. Kind of interesting.

Of course, I have not told you about the notation ARIMA(p,d,q). Well, p stands for the order of the autoregressive terms in the equation, q stands for the moving average terms, and d indicates the times the series is differenced to reduce it to a stationary time series. Take a look at Forecasting: principles and practice – the free forecasting text of Hyndman and Athanasopoulos – in the chapter on ARIMA modeling for more details.

Incidentally, I think it is great that Hyndman and some of his collaborators are providing an open source, indeed free, forecasting package with automatic forecasting capabilities, along with a high quality and, again, free textbook on forecasting to back it up. Eventually, some of these techniques might get dispersed into the general social environment, potentially raising the level of some discussions and thinking about our common future.

And I guess also I have to say that, ultimately, you need to learn the underlying theory and struggle with the algebra some. It can improve one’s ability to model these series.

accuracy of forecasts, analytical software, ARIMA models, data science, gold price forecasting, time series forecasting

More on Automatic Forecasting Packages – Autobox Gold Price Forecasts

April 29, 2014 Clive Jones

Yesterday, my post discussed the statistical programming language R and Rob Hyndman’s automatic forecasting package, written in R – facts about this program, how to download it, and an application to gold prices.

In passing, I said I liked Hyndman’s disclosure of his methods in his R package and “contrasted” that with leading competitors in the automatic forecasting market space –notably Forecast Pro and Autobox.

This roused Tom Reilly, currently Senior Vice-President and CEO of Automatic Forecast Systems – the company behind Autobox.

Reilly, shown above, wrote –

You say that Autobox doesn’t disclose its methods. I think that this statement is unfair to Autobox. SAS tried this (Mike Gilliland) on the cover of his book showing something purporting to a black box. We are a white box. I just downloaded the GOLD prices and recreated the problem and ran it. If you open details.htm it walks you through all the steps of the modeling process. Take a look and let me know your thoughts. Much appreciated!

AutoBox Gold Price Forecast

First, disregarding the issue of transparency for a moment, let’s look at a comparison of forecasts for this monthly gold price series (London PM fix).

A picture tells the story (click to enlarge).

So, for this data, 2007 to early 2011, Autobox dominates. That is, all forecasts are less than the respective actual monthly average gold prices. Thus, being linear, if one forecast method is more inaccurate than another for one month, that method is less accurate than the forecasts generated by this other approach for the entire forecast horizon.

I guess this does not surprise me. Autobox has been a serious contender in the M-competitions, for example, usually running just behind or perhaps just ahead of Forecast Pro, depending on the accuracy metric and forecast horizon. (For a history of these “accuracy contests” see Markridakis and Hibon’s article on M3).

And, of course, this is just one of many possible forecasts that can be developed with this time series, taking off from various ending points in the historic record.

The Issue of Transparency

In connection with all this, I also talked with Dave Reilly, a founding principal of Autobox, shown below.

Among other things, we went over the “printout” Tom Reilly sent, which details the steps in the estimation of a final time series model to predict these gold prices.

A blog post on the Autobox site is especially pertinent, called Build or Make your own ARIMA forecasting model? This discussion contains two flow charts which describe the process of building a time series model, I reproduce here, by kind permission.

The first provides a plain vanilla description of Box-Jenkins modeling.

The second flowchart adds steps revised for additions by Tsay, Tiao, Bell, Reilly & Gregory Chow (ie chow test).

Both start with plotting the time series to be analyzed and calculating the autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions.

But then additional boxes are added for accounting for and removing “deterministic” elements in the time series and checking for the constancy of parameters over the sample.

The analysis run Tom Reilly sent suggests to me that “deterministic” elements can mean outliers.

Dave Reilly made an interesting point about outliers. He suggested that the true autocorrelation structure can be masked or dampened in the presence of outliers. So the tactic of specifying an intervention variable in the various trial models can facilitate identification of autoregressive lags which otherwise might appear to be statistically not significant.

Really, the point of Autobox model development is to “create an error process free of structure.” That a Dave Reilly quote.

So, bottom line, Autobox’s general methods are well-documented. There is no problem of transparency with respect to the steps in the recommended analysis in the program. True, behind the scenes, comparisons are being made and alternatives are being rejected which do not make it to the printout of results. But you can argue that any commercial software has to keep some kernel of its processes proprietary.

I expect to be writing more about Autobox. It has a good track record in various forecasting competitions and currently has a management team that actively solicits forecasting challenges.

accuracy of forecasts, analytical software, gold price forecasting, locally weighted regression smoothing, machine learning

Loess Seasonal Decomposition as a Forecasting Tool

April 16, 2014 Clive Jones

I’ve applied something called loess decomposition to the London PM Fix gold series previously discussed in this blog.

This suggests insights missing from an application of Forecast Pro – a sort of standard in the automatic forecasting field.

Loess decomposition separates a time series into components – trend, seasonals, and residuals or remainder – based on locally weighted regression smoothing of the data.

I always wondered whether, in fact, there was a seasonal component to the monthly London PM fix time series.

Not every monthly or quarterly time series has credible seasonal components, of course.

The proof would seem to be in the pudding. If a program derives seasonal components for a time series, do those seasonal components improve forecasts? That seems to be the critical issue.

STL Decomposition

STL decomposition – seasonal trend decomposition based on loess – was proposed by Cleveland et al in an interesting-sounding publication called “The Journal of Official Statistics.” I found the citation working through the procedure for bagging exponential smoothing mentioned in the previous post.

Amazingly, there is an online resource which calculates this loess decomposition for data you input, based on a listed R routine. The citation is Wessa P., (2013), Decomposition by Loess (v1.0.2) in Free Statistics Software (v1.1.23-r7), Office for Research Development and Education, URL http://www.wessa.net/rwasp_decomposeloess.wasp/

Comparison of STL Decomposition and Forecast Pro Gold Price Forecasts

Here’s a typical graph comparing the forecast errors from the Forecast Pro runs with STL Decomposition.

The trend component extracted by the STL decomposition was uncomplicated and easy to forecast by linear extrapolation. I added the seasonal component to these extrapolations to get the monthly forecasts over the six month forecast horizon. Forecast Pro, on the other hand, did not signal the existence of a seasonal component in this series, and, furthermore, identified the optimal forecast model as a random walk and the optimal forecast as the last observed value.

Here is the trend component from the STL decomposition.

Discussion

Potentially, there is lots more to discuss here.

For example, to establish forecasts based on the loess decomposition of the gold price outperform Forecast Pro means compiling a large number of forecast comparisons, ideally one for all possible training sets beyond a minimum number of observations required for stable calculation of the STL algorithm. That is, each training set generates somewhat different values for the trend, seasonals, and residuals with loess decomposition. And Forecast Pro needs to be run for all these possible training sets also, with forecasts compared to out-of-sample data.

While I have not gone to this extent, I have done these computations several times with good results for STL decomposition.

Also, it’s clear that loess decomposition extracts constant variance seasonals. However, the shape of these seasonals change as the training set changes. It is necessary, thus, to study whether these changes can reflect multiplicative seasonality, for series in which that type of seasonality predominates. For example, perhaps STL seasonals tend to reflect the end points of the training sets.

Bergmeir, Hyndman, and Benıtez (BHB) apply a Box Cox transformation in one of their bagged exponential smoothing methods. This is possibly another way to sidestep problems of multiplicative or hetereoskedastic seasonality. It also makes sense when one is attempting to bag a time series.

However, my explorations suggest the results of STL decomposition are quite flexible, and, in the case of this gold price series, often produce superior forecasts to results from one of the main off-the-shelf automatic forecasting programs.

I personally am going to work on including STL decomposition in my forecasting toolkit.

gold price forecasting, inflation, Janet Yellen outlook, long term forecasting, multivariate modeling

Forecasting the Price of Gold – 3

March 20, 2014 Clive Jones

Ukraine developments and other counter-currents, such as Janet Yellen’s recent comments, highlight my final topic on gold price forecasting – multivariate gold price forecasting models.

On the one hand, there has been increasing uncertainty as a result of Ukrainian turmoil, counterbalanced today by the reaction to the seemingly hawkish comments by Chairperson Janet Yellen of the US Federal Reserve Bank.

Traditionally, gold is considered a hedge against uncertainty. Indulge your imagination and it’s not hard to conjure up scary scenarios in the Ukraine. On the other hand, some interpret Yellen as signaling an earlier move to moving the Federal funds rate off zero, increasing interest rates, and, in the eyes of the market, making gold more expensive to hold.

Multivariate Forecasting Models of Gold Price – Some Considerations

It’s this zoo of factors and influences that you have to enter, if you want to try to forecast the price of gold in the short or longer term.

Variables to consider include inflation, exchange rates, gold lease rates, interest rates, stock market levels and volatility, and political uncertainty.

A lot of effort has been devoted to proving or attempting to question that gold is a hedge against inflation.

The bottom line appears to be that gold prices rise with inflation – over a matter of decades, but in shorter time periods, intervening factors can drive the real price of gold substantially away from a constant relationship to the overall price level.

Real (and possibly nominal) interest rates are a significant influence on gold prices in shorter time periods, but this relationship is complex. My reading of the literature suggests a better understanding of the supply side of the picture is probably necessary to bring all this into focus.

The Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper 183 – Forecasting Gold as a Commodity – focuses on the supply side with charts such as the following –

The story here is that gold mine production responds to real interest rates, and thus the semi-periodic fluctuations in real interest rates are linked with a cycle of growth in gold production.

The Goldman Sachs Paper 183 suggests that higher real interest rates speed extraction, since the opportunity cost of leaving ore deposits in the ground increases. This is indeed the flip side of the negative impact of real interest rates on investment.

And, as noted in an earlier post,the Goldman Sachs forecast in 2010 proved prescient. Real interest rates have remained low since that time, and gold prices drifted down from higher levels at the end of the last decade.

Elasticities

Elasticities of response in a regression relationship show how percentage changes in the dependent variable – gold prices in this case – respond to percentage changes in, for example, the price level.

For gold to be an effective hedge against inflation, the elasticity of gold price with respect to changes in the price level should be approximately equal to 1.

This appears to be a credible elasticity for the United States, based on two studies conducted with different time spans of gold price data.

These studies are Gold as an Inflation Hedge? and the more recent Does Gold Act As An Inflation Hedge in the US and Japan. Also, a Gold Council report, Short-run and long-run determinants of the price of gold, develops a competent analysis.

These studies explore the cointegration of gold prices and inflation. Cointegration of unit root time series is an alternative to first differencing to reduce such time series to stationarity.

Thus, it’s not hard to show strong evidence that standard gold price series are one type or another of a random walk. Accordingly, straight-forward regression analysis of such series can easily lead to spurious correlation.

You might, for example, regress the price of gold onto some metric of the cumulative activity of an amoeba (characterized by Brownian motion) and come up with t-statistics that are, apparently, statistically significant. But that would, of course, be nonsense, and the relationship could evaporate with subsequent movements of either series.

So, the better research always gives consideration to the question of whether the variables in the models are, first of all, nonstationary OR whether there are cointegrated relationships.

While I am on the topic literature, I have to recommend looking at Theories of Gold Price Movements: Common Wisdom or Myths? This appears in the Wesleyan University Undergraduate Economic Review and makes for lively reading.

Thus, instead of viewing gold as a special asset, the authors suggest it is more reasonable to view gold as another currency, whose value is a reflection of the value of U.S. dollar.

The authors consider and reject a variety of hypotheses – such as the safe haven or consumer fear motivation to hold gold. They find a very significant relationship between the price movement of gold, real interest rates and the exchange rate, suggesting a close relationship between gold and the value of U.S. dollar. The multiple linear regressions verify these findings.

The Bottom Line

Over relatively long time periods – one to several decades – the price of gold moves more or less in concert with measures of the price level. In the shorter term, forecasting faces serious challenges, although there is a literature on the multivariate prediction of gold prices.

One prediction, however, seems reasonable on the basis of this review. Real interest rates should rise as the US Federal Reserve backs off from quantitative easing and other central banks around the world follow suit. Thus, increases in real interest rates seem likely at some point in the next few years. This seems to indicate that gold mining will strive to increase output, and perhaps that gold mining stocks might be a play.

ARIMA models, currency forecasts, financial forecasting, global business forecasts, gold price forecasting, predictive analytics, random walk

Forecasting the Price of Gold – 1

March 17, 2014 Clive Jones

I’m planning posts on forecasting the price of gold this week. This is an introductory post.

The Question of Price

What is the “price” of gold, or, rather, is there a single, integrated global gold market?

This is partly an anthropological question. Clearly in some locales, perhaps in rural India, people bring their gold jewelry to some local merchant or craftsman, and get widely varying prices. Presumably, though this merchant negotiates with a broker in a larger city of India, and trades at prices which converge to some global average. Very similar considerations apply to interest rates, which are significantly higher at pawnbrokers and so forth.

The World Gold Council uses the London PM fix, which at the time of this writing was $1,379 per troy ounce.

The Wikipedia article on gold fixing recounts the history of this twice daily price setting, dating back, with breaks for wars, to 1919.

One thing is clear, however. The “price of gold” varies with the currency unit in which it is stated. The World Gold Council, for example, supplies extensive historical data upon registering with them. Here is a chart of the monthly gold prices based on the PM or afternoon fix, dating back to 1970.

Another insight from this chart is that the price of gold may be correlated with the price of oil, which also ramped up at the end of the 1970’s and again in 2007, recovering quickly from the Great Recession in 2008-09 to surge up again by 2010-11.

But that gets ahead of our story.

The Supply and Demand for Gold

Here are two valuable tables on gold supply and demand fundamentals, based on World Gold Council sources, via an An overview of global gold market and gold price forecasting. I’ve more to say about the forecasting model in that article, but the descriptive material is helpful (click to enlarge).

These tables give an idea of the main components of gold supply and demand over a several years recently.

Gold is an unusual commodity in that one of its primary demand components – jewelry – can contribute to the supply-side. Thus, gold is in some sense renewable and recyclable.

Table 1 above shows the annual supplies in this period in the last decade ran on the order of three to four thousand tonnes, where a tonne is 2,240 pounds and equal conveniently to 1000 kilograms.

Demand for jewelry is a good proportion of this annual supply, with demands by ETF’s or exchange traded funds rising rapidly in this period. The industrial and dental demand is an order of magnitude lower and steady.

One of the basic distinctions is between the monetary versus nonmonetary uses or demands for gold.

In total, central banks held about 30,000 tonnes of gold as reserves in 2008.

Another estimated 30,000 tonnes was held in inventory for industrial uses, with a whopping 100,000 tonnes being held as jewelry.

India and China constitute the largest single countries in terms of consumer holdings of gold, where it clearly functions as a store of value and hedge against uncertainty.

Gold Market Activity

In addition to actual purchases of gold, there are gold futures. The CME Group hosts a website with gold future listings. The site states,

Gold futures are hedging tools for commercial producers and users of gold. They also provide global gold price discovery and opportunities for portfolio diversification. In addition, they: Offer ongoing trading opportunities, since gold prices respond quickly to political and economic events, Serve as an alternative to investing in gold bullion, coins, and mining stocks

Some of these contracts are recorded at exchanges, but it seems the bulk of them are over-the-counter.

A study by the London Bullion Market Association estimates that 10.9bn ounces of gold, worth $15,200bn, changed hands in the first quarter of 2011 just in London’s markets. That’s 125 times the annual output of the world’s gold mines – and twice the quantity of gold that has ever been mined.

The Forecasting Problem

The forecasting problem for gold prices, accordingly, is complex. Extant series for gold prices do exist and underpin a lot of the market activity at central exchanges, but the total volume of contracts and gold exchanging hands is many times the actual physical quantity of the product. And there is a definite political dimension to gold pricing, because of the monetary uses of gold and the actions of central banks increasing and decreasing their reserves.

But the standard approaches to the forecasting problem are the same as can be witnessed in any number of other markets. These include the usual time series methods, focused around arima or autoregressive moving average models and multivariate regression models. More up-to-date tactics revolve around tests of cointegration of time series and VAR models. And, of course, one of the fundamental questions is whether gold prices in their many incarnations are best considered to be a random walk.

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