A Bayesian Approach to Time Series Forecasting – Towards Data Science

Today we are going to implement a Bayesian linear regression in R from scratch and use it to forecast US GDP growth. This post is based on a very informative manual from the Bank of England on Applied Bayesian Econometrics. I have translated the original Matlab code into R since its open source and widely used in data analysis/science. My main goal in this post is to try and give people a better understanding of Bayesian statistics, some of it's advantages and also some scenarios where you might want to use it. Let's take a moment to think about why we would we even want to use Bayesian techniques in the first place.