Forecasting

Presentations | English

Out of all the things Nostradamus predicted, why couldn’t he predict the shortage of toilet paper in the year 2020? Funny, isn’t it? Life would have been much easier if the whole thing was predictable. Forecasting is the process of making predictions based on past and present data and most commonly by analysis of trends. There are differences between forecast and prediction but they are interchangeable. The evening news gives the weather forecast not the weather prediction. A commonplace example might be estimation of some variable of interest at some specified future date. Qualitative techniques are subjective, based on the opinion and judgment of consumers and experts; they are appropriate when past data are not available. They are usually applied to intermediate- or long-range decisions. Quantitative forecasting models are used to forecast future data as a function of past data. They are appropriate to use when past numerical data is available and when it is reasonable to assume that some of the patterns in the data are expected to continue into the future.