A case study of the 2004 U.S. Presidential election by researchers at Yale shows that prediction markets are proving to be a strong forecasting tool, one that may have an impact in calling the current presidential contest between Democrat Senator Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain.

The scope of forecasting is changing rapidly and it is becoming even more challenging to present accurate forecasts in the fast-paced pharmaceutical environment. Following the success of their Total Market Forecasting conferences, VIBevents is pleased to announce the 9th Annual Total Market Forecasting in Pharma Europe conference.

In this issue we have: Post-Construction Evaluation of Traffic Forecast Accuracy ; Bayesian Demographic Modeling and Forecasting: An Application to U.S. Mortality ; Forecasting Elections from Voters’ Perceptions of Candidates’ Positions on Issues and Policies and more.

The rate of growth for the pharmaceuticals market is slowing down while competition and operating costs continue to increase. Now more than ever, forecasters need to meet these challenges by accurately predicting demand for both new and in-line products.

Principles Of Forecasting: A Handbook For Researchers And Practitioners summarizes knowledge from experts and from empirical studies. It provides guidelines that can be applied in fields such as economics, sociology, and psychology. It applies to problems such as those in finance, marketing, personnel, and production.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University's School of Hotel and Tourism Management has released the second issue of the Hong Kong Tourism Forecasting Report reviewing forecasts of the demand for Hong Kong tourism from Mainland China and Taiwan.

Forecasting has been around almost as long as business itself, but over the past decade or more, the supply chain industry has seen the rise of Demand Planning software to provide support for both quantitative number crunching as well as managing the “work flow” associated with the forecasting process.

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." That's what baseball great Yogi Berra once said. Noam Danon of startup Qmarkets, disagrees. Thanks to his company's technology, predicting the future just got a little easier and more accurate, for businesses at least.

In this issue we have: Recurrent Support Vector Regression for a Nonlinear ARMA Model with Applications to Forecasting Financial Returns ; Comparing Forecast Performance of Exchange Rate Models ; Forecasting inflation and tracking monetary policy in the euro area ; Bayesian Forecasting using Stochastic Search Variable Selection in a VAR Subject to Breaks ; and more.