Analytics Magazine Analytics Magazine, July/August 2014 | Page 72

FO RE CAST ING Figure 3: Initial daily domestic box-office gross of the motion picture (“Non-Stop”). March 16, or 17 days of data. The students were asked to make a time plot of these box-office figures (see Figure 3) and, after examining various trend models, get a forecast for the cumulative domestic box-office gross for a target date, midterm day, March 31. I knew that two days later (after I had graded their exams and returned them), Universal Studios would give the actual cumulative domestic gross of the film as of March 31. It was $85.39 million. Of the various trend models we covered, the Weibull curve yielded the most accurate forecast, $86.11 million; another model was reasonably close, and the others we discussed and they tried were way off. 72 | A N A LY T I C S - M A G A Z I N E . O R G CATEGORIZING THE FORECAST SOFTWARE Commercial forecasting software is available in two broad categories. Using the nomenclature from previous OR/MS Today forecasting surveys, the first category is called dedicated software. A dedicated product implies that the software only has various forecasting capabilities, such as Box-Jenkins, exponential smoothing, trend analysis, regression and other procedures. The second category is called general statistical software. This implies the product does have forecasting techniques as a subset of the many statistical procedures it can do. Thus, a product that can do ANOVA, factor analysis, etc., as well as Box-Jenkins techniques would fall into W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G