While reading this page on time series I found this sentence:
The Ljung-Box test showed that there is little evidence of non-zero autocorrelations in the in-sample forecast errors, and the distribution of forecast errors seems to be normally distributed with mean zero. This suggests that the simple exponential smoothing method provides an adequate predictive model for London rainfall, which probably cannot be improved upon. Furthermore, the assumptions that the 80% and 95% prediction intervals were based upon (that there are no autocorrelations in the forecast errors, and the forecast errors are normally distributed with mean zero and constant variance) are probably valid
Why does the evidence that the residual is similar to white noise mean that the simple exponential smoothing (tested on the web page) should be considered valid and over all why can't we improve upon it?
