Synthesis or selection of forecasting models

This report is relevant to the practical forecasting situation in which a decision-maker is faced with several feasible predictors for his variable of interest. If he has a substantial amount of data available on the performance of each of his predictors, then it is well known that a composite forecast can be suitably derived as an optimal forecasting procedure. Alternatively, if only a small amount of evidence is available on the predictors' performance, then there appear to be controversial recommendations upon whether it is still optimal to pursue a policy of synthesis leading to a composite predictor or whether it is better to attempt a selection of the singularly best forecasting model. This report discusses some of the associated issues and provides some experimental evidence on the performance of these two policies.