On unbiasedness of an optimal forecast

Question

Diebold "Forecasting in Economics, Business, Finance and Beyond" (v. 1 August 2017) section 10.1 lists absolute standards for point forecasts, with the first one being unbiasedness: Optimal forecasts are unbiased. There is a brief follow-up there, too: If the forecast is unbiased, then the forecast error has a zero mean.

I have a quibble with this. Let $Y$ be the random variable the realization of which we are trying to predict, and let $z$ be the forecast. If

1. we know at the time of making the forecast that it will be judged by a quantile loss function (say, a $p$-level quantile)

and

2. our goal is to minimize the expected loss,

we should target the relevant quantile of the distribution, $z=F_Y^{-1}(p)$, where $F_{Y}$ is the cumulative distribution function of $Y$. I would be willing to call $z=z^*:=F_Y^{-1}(p)$ an optimal forecast. However, unless the quantile coincides with the mean, $z$ will produce an error $e:=Y-z$ with $\mathbb{E}(e)$, breaking Diebold's optimality property.

Question: How could we reformulate the optimality property for it to make more sense? What if we defined unbiasedness w.r.t. the loss-minimizing target instead of the realization of $Y$ (so that in my example, an optimal forecast would have the expected value of $F_Y^{-1}(p)$ instead of $\mathbb{E}(Y)$ as per Diebold)? Or are there circumstances where such version of unbiasedness is not desirable?

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Update: To be fair, Diebold writes the following in section 2.8 (on p. 38):

Quite generally under asymmetric $L(e)$ loss (e.g., linlin), optimal forecasts are biased, whereas the conditional mean forecast is unbiased. Bias is optimal under asymmetric loss because we can gain on average by pushing the forecasts in the direction such that we make relatively few errors of the more costly sign.

But he does not reiterate nor even hint at that in the beginning of chapter 10 (e.g. on p. 334-335) where he discusses forecast optimality – even though he does mention the loss function there:

This unforecastability principle is valid in great generality; it holds, for example, regardless of whether linear-projection optimality or conditional-mean optimality is of interest, regardless of whether the relevant loss function is quadratic, and regardless of whether the series being forecast is stationary.

(The first emphasis is the author's, the second is mine.)

Answer 1

Bias and unbiasedness are concepts that apply to estimates, or estimators, of an unknown population parameter. Thus, I would argue it makes no sense to discuss "the (un)biasedness of a point forecast" without - explicitly or implicitly - specifying which functional of the future distribution we want to forecast.

We may want to forecast conditional expectations, and then our point forecast may be biased or unbiased as an expectation forecast. This is Diebold's implicit assumption.

However, as you write, it is quite often the case that we don't want an expectation forecast, but a quantile forecast. (For instance, for setting target safety stocks, or to build dams that are not only high enough for average floods, but for long tail floods.) In this case, I would say it makes perfect sense to discuss whether a particular quantile forecast is biased or unbiased. In this latter case, of course an unbiased quantile forecast will usually not have an expected error of zero.

A related but separate problem is that of detecting biases in our point forecasts. Yes, we can use quantile losses to elicit quantile forecasts... but given a sequence of quantile forecasts and corresponding realizations, each separate forecast, or the entire algorithm for producing them, may or may not be biased. And this is very hard to detect.