Practical Time Series Forecasting: A Hands-On Guide [3rd Edition] (Practical Analytics)

PRACTICAL TIME SERIES FORECASTING is a hands-on introduction to quantitative forecasting of time series. Quantitative forecasting, known as forecasting analytics, is an important component of decision making in a wide range of areas and across many business functions including economic forecasting, workload projections, sales forecasts, and transportation demand. Forecasting is also widely used in automated applications such as forecasting flight delays, web keyword search volume, and weather. Forecasting is heavily used in many areas outside of business, such as in demography and climatology.

This book introduces readers to the most popular statistical models and data mining algorithms used in practice. It covers issues relating to different steps of the forecasting process, from goal definition through data collection, visualization, pre-processing, modeling, performance evaluation to implementation and communication. The third edition offers improved organization, updated software screenshots, and additional material.

PRACTICAL TIME SERIES FORECASTING is suitable for courses on forecasting at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels, and in professional business analytics and data science programs. It offers clear explanations, examples, end-of-chapter problems and cases. Methods are illustrated using XLMiner, an Excel add-on. However, any software that has time series forecasting capabilities can be used with the book. For R users, an R edition of this textbook is available.

GALIT SHMUELI, PhD, is Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Service Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She is co-author of the best-selling textbook Data Mining for Business Analytics, among other books and numerous publications in top journals. She has designed and instructed courses on forecasting, data mining, statistics and other data analytics topics at University of Maryland's Smith School of Business, the Indian School of Business, National Tsing Hua University and online at statistics.com.