Introduction

Abstract

Predicting the future behaviour of natural and economic processes is the subject of research in various fields of science. After a period of considerable progress by refining models in combination with large scale computer calculations, the scientific community is presently confronted with problems that require a novel approach to further extend the range of forecasts and to improve their quality. It is recognized that nonlinearity of a system may significantly complicate the predictability of future states of the system. A small variation of parameters can drastically change the dynamics, while sensitive dependence on the initial state may severely limit the predictability horizon.