Forecasting Methods (Spanish Version)

Abstract

This is a course material for an introductory course in Probability and Statistics for Engineering and Management. It is part of some course notes for my courses in Spanish on that subject. The draft of the book is Apuntes de Probabilidad y Estadística para Ingeniería y Administración (Notes for Probability and Statistic for Engineering and Management) and this part is Métodos de pronóstico (Forecasting Methods).

Humankind has pursued the knowledge of the future. Remember the sybil in the Delphi oracle. In this chapter we present and describe the most known forecasting methods. We show in detail how to use the decomposition method to make forecasting when there are several components in the data. This is, trend, seasonality, cycle and error. We take a set of real monthly data and keep the last 12 months to test how good the forecast was and compare several methods. All these methods are studied using intensively the spreadsheet.

Keywords: Forecasting methos, smoothing methods, decomposition methods

JEL Classification: C53, E17, E27, E37, E47, F17