Principles of Business Forecasting

Ord/Fildes PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS FORECASTING, 1E serves as both a textbook for students and as a reference book for experienced forecasters in a variety of fields. The authors' motivation for writing this book is to give users the tools and insight to make the most effective forecasts drawing on the latest research ideas. Ord and Fildes have designed PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS FORECASTING for users who have taken a first course in applied statistics or who have an equivalent background. This book introduces both standard and advanced forecasting methods and their underlying models, and also includes general principles to guide and simplify forecasting practice. A key strength of the book is its emphasis on real data sets, taken from government and business sources and used in each chapter's examples. Forecasting techniques are demonstrated using a variety of software platforms and the companion website provides easy-to-use Excel® macros to support the basic methods. After the introductory chapters, the focus shifts to using extrapolative methods (exponential smoothing and ARIMA) and then to statistical model-building using multiple regression. The authors also cover more novel techniques including data mining and judgmental methods, which are gaining increasing attention in applications. Finally, they examine organizational issues of implementation and the development of a forecasting support system within an organization.

About the Author :
Keith Ord is Sebes Fellow and Professor in the Operations and Information Management group at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He completed his graduate work at the University of London and held faculty positions at the Universities of Bristol and Warwick before moving to The Pennsylvania State University in 1980 and then to Georgetown University in 1999. His research interests include time series and forecasting, spatial modeling and the statistical modeling of business processes. He is a co-author of the 2008 research monograph FORECASTING WITH EXPONENTIAL SMOOTHING: THE STATE SPACE APPROACH and also co-authored Kendall's ADVANCED THEORY OF STATISTICS. He has served as an editor of the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FORECASTING and is currently an associate editor, as well as being on the editorial boards of several other journals. Keith is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the International Institute of Forecasters. Robert Fildes is Distinguished Professor of Management Science in the School of Management, Lancaster University and Director of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting. He has a mathematics degree from Oxford and a Ph.D. from the University of California in Statistics. He was co-founder in 1981 of the JOURNAL OF FORECASTING and in 1985 of the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FORECASTING. For ten years from 1988 he was Editor-in-Chief of the IJF and remains an associate editor. He was president of the International Institute of Forecasters between 2000 and 2004. His research interests are concerned with the comparative evaluation of different forecasting methods, the implementation of improved forecasting procedures in organizations and the design of forecasting systems. In 1976 he wrote one of the earliest business forecasting textbooks. Though long out-of-print, many of its core ideas have survived the test of time. Robert is a Fellow of the International Institute of Forecasters and of the Operational Research Society.