When it comes to analyzing trends,
most the products I tried fall into the semiautomatic group. That is, I need to choose a
trend curve, and the software finds the appropriate parameters for that model, gives
forecasts, summary statistics and graphs.
WORKING WITH A SAMPLE OF
PRODUCTS
In my class, students use StatTools,
part of the Palisade Software Suite that
comes with their textbook. Its forecasting
capabilities are regression, exponential
smoothing (Brown, Holt and Winters’) and
moving averages. If data followed some
nonlinear function, the students could
make mathematical transformations to
make the data linear and then use ordinary linear regression on it, and do the
inverse transformation to get the forecast.
They also have several Excel templates
I developed (Gompertz, Pearl-Reed,
Weibull, etc.) for the course. For this article, I tried a small sample of professional
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