## Tuesday, November 1, 2022

### Holt Double Exponential Smoothing

Given a time series $x_t,\, t=1,2,\dots,$ presumed to contain linear trend, Holt's double exponential smoothing method computes estimates $s_t$ of the level (mean) at time $t$ and $b_t$ of the (presumed constant) slope using the following formulas: $$s_t = \alpha x_t + (1-\alpha)(s_{t-1} + b_{t-1})$$ and $$b_t = \beta(s_t - s_{t-1}) + (1-\beta)b_{t-1}$$ where $\alpha,\beta \in (0,1)$ are smoothing weights. A recent question on OR Stack Exchange asked why the second formula is based on the level estimate and not the observed value. In other words, the proposed alternative to the trend update was $$b_t = \beta(x_t - x_{t-1}) + (1-\beta)b_{t-1}.$$

The intuition for doing it Holt's way is fairly simple. If exponential smoothing is working as intended (meaning smoothing things), then the difference in level estimates $s_t - s_{t-1}$ should be less variable than the difference in observed values $x_t - x_{t-1}.$ A formal proof probably involves induction arguments, requiring more functioning brain cells than I had available at the time, so I was a bit loose mathematically in my answer on OR SE. Just to confirm the intuition, I did some Monte Carlo simulations in R. The notebook containing the experimental setup, including code, is available here. It requires the dplyr and ggplot2 library packages.

The following plots show confidence intervals over time for the errors in the level and trend estimates using both Holt's formula and what I called the "variant" method. They are from a single experiment (100 independent time series with identical slope and intercept, smoothed both ways), but other trials with different random number seeds and changes to the variability of the noise produced similar results.

In both cases, the estimates start out a bit wobbly (and the Holt estimates may actually be a bit noisier), but over time both stabilize. There does not seem to be much difference between the two approaches in how noisy the level estimates are, at least in this run. The Holt estimates may have slightly narrower confidence intervals, but that is not clear, and the difference if any seems pretty small. The Holt trend estimates, however, are considerably less noisy than those of the variant method, supporting the intuitive argument.