To bring forecasting to life, our objective in this chapter is to provide readers with a short and simple example of how to apply and interpret a statistical forecasting method in practice. This example is stylized and illustrative only—in reality, forecasting is messier, but it serves as a guideline of how to think about and successfully execute a forecasting method and apply it for decision making.
3.1. Point Forecasts
Suppose you are interested in predicting weekly demand for a particular product. Specifically, you have historical data from the past 50 weeks and you want to get a forecast for how demand for your product will develop over the next 10 weeks, that is, weeks 51 to 60 (see Figure 3.1). Completing this ...
Get Demand Forecasting for Managers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
