0 a person who tells you what particular conditions are expected to be like:
1 a person or company whose job is to judge what is likely to happen in the future, based on information they have now:
Independent forecasters believe the prime minister's growth forecasts are still too optimistic.
These can be seen as 'hedging' devices, expressing the forecaster's degree of certainty about predictions in the forecast.
Some forecasters use informal judgment along with models and data to produce forecasts.
An analogy for the results of such reduction can be seen in how weather forecasters report the heat index along with measured temperature.
First, forecasting macroeconomic aggregates is of obvious utility to business and policymakers, and yet, the track record of economic forecasters is mixed.
From the standpoint of an election forecaster everything that could go wrong did.
The respondents, who supply anonymous answers, are professional forecasters from the business and financial community.
If a forecaster aims at longer horizons-developing scenarios for several decades-pure extrapolation of statistically identified coefficient structures often fails.
For example, a weather forecaster predicts rain not on the basis of clairvoyance but on the basis of patterns of prior meteorological events.
