RuleBased Forecasting

Greetings:

With the collaboration of three most excellent colleagues I have returned to the world of Quantitative Analysis and Forecasting. Finally!! Monica Adya was kind enough to send me the 1992 code that she did for seminal work that was co-authored by Fred Collopy and J. Scott Armstrong in 1992. It's all in C++ but I hope to begin by transferring to a combination of either Drools (or JRules or Advisor or OPS or JessJ or whatever) and Java. Or, perhaps, just leave the processing in C++ and abstract out the logic into CLIPS or ILOG Rules. (ILOG Rules is NOT free and, to my knowledge, they don't have a six-month version like JRules.)

I'm rather leaning to Drools and Java since (1) both are free and (2) it would be easier for the domain expert forecasters to read the reasoning in Drools than in C++ or Java. It would be nice if ILOG JRules or Rules, OPSJ or Blaze Advisor had some variant of an academic license that we could use for research. Although, JRules does have a six-month license that I might be able to keep extending for a while. Drools, JRules and OPSJ all have a similar syntax while CLIPS (C/C++) and Jess (Java) share a virtually identical syntax for the rules.

Probably I'll do the first cut in Drools and Java and see how that goes. If performance is adequate, meaning not over a minute or two to process large quantities of data, then I'll leave it alone. If it takes too long then maybe I'll move it to ILOG Rules or CLIPS.

Thanks again to Monica for having the foresight to have saved all of the old C++ stuff for so many years. :-)

SDG
jco