micasmac/oregon-timber-market-timing

Oregon Timber Market Timing Model

Predicts Douglas fir stumpage prices ($/MBF) and recommends optimal timing for marketing timber on a 20-acre tract in Oregon, Pacific Northwest.

How It Works

1. Ridge regression with 21 engineered features (price lags, lumber PPI, housing starts, interest rates, CAD/USD, seasonality)
2. Walk-forward validation on 2015–2024 hold-out data
3. 500-sample bootstrap forecast for 8 quarters ahead with prediction intervals
4. Monte Carlo optimal stopping (50,000 price path simulations) to decide: sell now or wait

Performance

Metric	Score
Overall R² (walk-forward)	0.85
Mean Absolute Error	$50/MBF
Training data	122 quarters (1993–2024)

Key Price Drivers

| Rank | Feature | |Coefficient| | |------|---------|-----------------| | 1 | price_lag1q | 45.8 | | 2 | lumber_futures | 26.0 | | 3 | lumber_ppi | 25.0 | | 4 | Q1 seasonality | 20.4 | | 5 | price_lag2q | 20.1 |

Usage

import pickle
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline

with open('oregon_timber_model.pkl', 'rb') as f:
    bundle = pickle.load(f)
    model = bundle['model']
    feature_cols = bundle['feature_cols']

# Prepare features matching bundle['feature_cols'] and predict
# price = model.predict(features)[0]

Full training and inference pipeline available in timber_final.py.

Data Sources (Production)

Source	Data	Access
Oregon Dept of Forestry	Quarterly timber sale results	oregon.gov/ODF
FRED (St. Louis Fed)	Housing starts, lumber PPI, mortgage rates	Free API
CME / yfinance	Lumber futures (LBS=F)	Free
Random Lengths	Weekly lumber composite	Paid (~$300/yr)

Note: Training data in this repo is synthetic, calibrated to published USDA PNW stumpage statistics. Replace with actual ODF data for production use.

Citation

Inspired by Faustmann rotation model (1849), Clarke & Reed real-options timber harvesting (1989), and USDA Pacific Northwest stumpage research (PNW-GTR-423, PNW-RP-436).

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