More Predictive Analytics: Microsoft Excel

1. Smoothing and Its Alternatives

In This Chapter

Regression in Forecasting

Regression or Smoothing?

Back around 1997 (my gosh, has it been that long?), I walked into the office of the chief operating officer of a mid-sized hospital for a meeting. He was an empiricist. He believed in what data, carefully gathered and intelligently analyzed, could tell him about the hospital’s operations, its value to the community, its compliance with the spirit and the letter of the regulatory environment, and its fiscal health.

I had been consulting at that hospital for around six months—long enough, if only just barely, to have developed some measure of credibility with the client. The man I was meeting with had concerns about how the hospital was going ...