Companies, governments, and other organizations now collect and analyze huge amounts of data about suppliers, clients, employees, citizens, transactions, and much more. Business analytics uses this data to make better decisions and forecasting is an arm of this predictive analytics. Forecasting especially can provide a powerful toolkit for analyzing time series data.
Forecasting can also be combined with statistical monitoring methods for purposes of anomaly detection – for example, public health organizations collect and monitor clinical and other data for detecting disease outbreaks. Forecasting is also often combined with simulation for purposes of scenario building. The course “Business Analytics Using Forecasting” looks at some of these uses in more depth as well as examining the processes that these different industries use. In the course, you will learn a scientific and practical approach for creating and evaluating forecasting solutions.
Business Analytics Using Forecasting Course Content
This course focuses on forecasting time series, where past and present values are used to forecast future values of a series of interest. The course covers issues relating to different steps of the forecasting process, from goal definition, through data visualization, modeling, and performance evaluation to model deployment.
The course includes the following topics:
- How to define a forecasting task and workflow;
- How to evaluate forecasting performance;
- Popular forecasting methods;
- Exploring, identifying and modeling different types of patterns in time series;
- Implementing a forecasting process in practice.
Requirements
- Familiarity with basic statistical methods including linear regression.
- Basic knowledge of Excel and R software.
Summary of Main Course Features
- Created by: National Tsing Hua University
- Educator: Galit Shmueli
- Starts: To Be Announced
- Duration: 6 weeks x 3 hours per week
- Certificates available
Price: Free
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