This study investigates empirical methods of generating prediction intervals for WASDE forecasts of corn, soybean, and wheat prices over the 1980/81 through 2006/07 marketing years. Empirical methods use historical forecast errors to estimate forecast error distributions, which are then used to predict confidence limits of forecasts. Five procedures were used to estimate empirical confidence limits, including histograms, kernel density estimation, logistic distribution, quantile regression, and quantile regression with stocks-to-use ratios.
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