Flexible global forecast combinations

Forecast combination – the aggregation of individual forecasts from multiple experts or models – is a proven approach to economic forecasting. To date, research on economic forecasting has concentrated on local combination methods, which handle separate but related forecasting tasks in isolation. Yet, it has been known for over two decades in the machine learning community that global methods, which exploit task-relatedness, can improve on local methods that ignore it. Motivated by the possibility for improvement, this paper introduces a framework for globally combining forecasts while being flexible to the level of task-relatedness. Through our framework, we develop global versions of several existing forecast combinations. To evaluate the efficacy of these new global forecast combinations, we conduct extensive comparisons using synthetic and real data. Our real data comparisons, which involve forecasts of core economic indicators in the Eurozone, provide empirical evidence that the accuracy of global combinations of economic forecasts can surpass local combinations. •Soft global combination weights can include information from related tasks.•Soft global combination beats equal weights in the pre-COVID period in the Eurozone.•The method can be applied to model and expert forecasts and to density forecasts.