Professor Collaborates With the Department of Energy to Produce Energy Price Forecasts

The U.S. Department of Energy has asked Giovanni Petris, an associate professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Arkansas, to collaborate in the development of effective statistical models to forecast energy prices for various energy sources in the next decades.

With the recent and current development of new technologies for the extraction of oil and gas, the relationships among the prices of different energy sources — as well as the relationships linking those prices to other fundamental economic variables — are likely to undergo profound structural changes whose nature is still highly uncertain.

It is therefore of paramount importance, in order to obtain useful forecasts, to employ statistical models that incorporate experts' input but are at the same time flexible enough to quickly adapt to the evidence provided by new data as these become available.

Professor Petris is an expert in time series analysis and a renowned leader in the field of dynamic models, which are particularly well-suited for the prediction problem the Department of Energy is facing.

In addition to the many research articles in this area, he has developed a software package and written a book on the subject. Both the software, written in the popular statistical programming language R, and the book are used by researchers, practitioners and students worldwide.