Time Series Analysis on AWS

Chapter 2: An Overview of Amazon Forecast

Time series forecasting is a very popular and widely used technique to deliver insights to a large variety of business stakeholders. Although the values predicted by a forecast can be used as they are (this is, for instance, what you do when you use spreadsheet formulas to feed financial planning practices and predict a business unit's (BU's) results to inform the appropriate business development decisions), they are usually a means to an end: forecasting then becomes an essential cog that feeds other models or business processes (forecasting product demand to optimize the production of manufactured goods).

Time series forecasting was around before machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence ( ...