Selecting an optimal model for forecasting the volumes of railway goods transportation

Consideration was given to selection of an optimal model of short-term forecasting of the volumes of railway transport from the historical and exogenous time series. The historical data carry information about the transportation volumes of various goods between pairs of stations. It was assumed that the result of selecting an optimal model depends on the level of aggregation in the types of goods, departure and destination points, and time. Considered were the models of vector autoregression, integrated model of the autoregressive moving average, and a nonparametric model of histogram forecasting. Criteria for comparison of the forecasts on the basis of distances between the errors of model forecasts were proposed. They are used to analyze the models with the aim of determining the admissible requests for forecast, the actual forecast depth included.