Comparing Predictive Accuracy

Abstract

We propose and evaluate explicit tests of the null hypothesis of no difference in the accuracy of two competing forecasts. In contrast to previously developed tests, a wide variety of accuracy measures can be used (in particular, the loss function need not be quadratic and need not even be symmetric), and forecast errors can be non-Gaussian, nonzero mean, serially correlated, and contemporaneously correlated. Asymptotic and exact finite-sample tests are proposed, evaluated, and illustrated.