The need for more emphasis on prediction: A “nondenominational” model-based approach

Prediction problems are ubiquitous. In a model-based approach to predictive inference, the values of random variables that are presently observable are used to make inferences about the values of random variables that will become observable in the future, and the joint distribution of the random variables or various of its characteristics are assumed to be known up to the value of a vector of unknown parameters. Such an approach has proved to be highly effective in many important applications.