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Local Gas Predictors Coming Soon
As of the end of 2009, we are publishing local forecasts for each of the twelve localities we use in modeling our National Gas Predictor forecasts. Since then, we have added one local forecast for a city (Las Vegas) which is not used in our national model. We now have no specific plans as to which cities we will begin forecasting next.
What would you like to see next? Let us know by using the form below, and we will adjust our plans if enough people request any particular cities or regions.
Before we begin publishing our Gas Predictor for any particular locality, we need to adjust our forecasting algorithm for that area. The same general algorthm has worked quite well in most areas where we have tested so far, but it needs some tweaking in order to be precise enough to be useful. We can easily adjust it to predict the direction of movement in gas prices for a particular area - up, down, or steady - but it takes more adjustment and testing to get it to predict the actual price range of gasoline.
For example, before we had perfected our forecasting for Nashua, New Hampshire, there was a day when it predicted that prices would move up the next day, from the current day's $1.75 per gallon to a range between $1.77 and $2.10. In fact, the next day, gas was selling in Nashua for $1.81 per gallon. We were correct, but the spread was just too large to be useful. We want to give you a forecast that you can use, and it takes time to develop and back-test our prediction algorithm for each locality.
At present, we have many months worth of gas price history for about 21 localities in addition to the twelve we are already publishing. For some of these locales, our algorithm works rather well, and we could begin publishing local forecasts for these cities in fairly short order. For other localities, our algorithm just doesn't seem to work, and we suspect that there are factors operating in these markets for which our algorithm does not take account, and which may not be recorded in the data we have on hand. For these cities, we would have to do a good deal more studing and tweaking, and we would need more time to gather more pertinent data, before we could publish reliable and useful predictions. Many of these 21 localities are listed on our "Unofficial Predictions" page, and you can see day to day how well or how poorly our forecasts work for these locales.
If many visitors to our site request local gas price predictions for cities for which we do not currently have any data, it would take us quite some time to record enough daily gas prices to be sure that our algorithm works in that area. We would not be able to publish forecasts for any arbitrary city until at least four months after we begin collecting data. And even then, if that four month period happened to be in a very stable market trend, we would have to wait for a more dynamic situation before we could know that our prediction algorithm was working. For example, in the spring and summer of 2008, gas prices everywhere were going nowhere but up. If our algorithm always predicted increasing prices, fine, but how would we know that we had it adjusted correctly for declining prices? We would have to wait until our data set included some ups and some downs in order to back-test our prediction system to know that it was really working.
We'll roll them out as quickly as we can, but only when we can be confident in our predictions.
Suggest a Link or Request Gas Predictions
We would like to fine-tune our predictions for various locations within the 48 contiguous United States. Our current algorithm is optimized and tested to predict direction of movement of gas prices nationwide. We are working on adjusting it to predict precise ranges of prices for particular areas. What city or region would you like to see? Let us know, and we'll see what we can do.
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