Predicting the Future

A TEAM OF MATHEMATICIANS has recently taken steps to improve our ability to predict future data.

- —Caroline Delbert

It’s not exactly fortunetelling, but forecasting is a huge industry that much of our economy relies on—from making sure your favorite author's new book is in stock to ensuring there are enough turkeys for Thanksgiving this year.

Taeho Kim from Lehigh University led a team of seven mathematicians in this work, which is currently available as a preprint on arXiv. In the introduction, Kim and his team explain why prediction has turned from science fiction into essential global work:

“[P]rediction [functions are]...one of the most important and consequential endeavors of statisticians, mathematicians, machine learners, data scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers, with deep implications and utilities in many facets of science, engineering, medicine, health, economics, business, politics, and in general, society... Regression models, many machine learning algorithms, artificial neural nets, deep learners, and large language models are about prediction machines!”