The M5 Competition and the Future of Human Expertise in Forecasting

The M5 forecasting competition is the latest and most widely contested since the first M competition in 1979. Numerous articles have been written appraising the structure of the competitions and the value of their results for forecasting methodology and practice. Mike Gilliland's discussion of the prior competition-the M4-in Foresight's Spring 2020 issue as well as Casper Bojer and Jens Peter Meldgaard's preview of the M5 in our Summer 2020 issue offer nontechnical overviews of these most recent forecasting competitions and their potential influence on the ways we forecast. Other background information on the competitions can be found at https://mofc.unic.ac.cy/. As there was with the M4, there will be a special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting-our sister IIF publication-devoted to a comprehensive assessment of the M5. The preprint "The M5 Accuracy Competition: Results, Findings, and Conclusions" provides a detailed discussion of the participants, methods, and results: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344487258. Here, Spyros Makridakis, creator and overseer of the M forecasting competitions (and the person for whom they are named), and Evangelos Spiliotis, his closest collaborator, distill that initial report on the M5 to highlight the winning entries and what they say about the value of expertise in forecast modeling. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2021