Welcome to our new online textbook on forecasting. This book is intended as a replacement for Makridakis, Wheelwright and Hyndman (Wiley 1998).
The entire book is available online and free-of-charge. Of course, we won’t make much money doing this, but textbooks never make much money anyway — the publishers make all the money. We’d rather create something that is widely used and useful, than have large publishers profit from our efforts.
Eventually a print version and a downloadable e-version of the book will be available to purchase on Amazon, but not until a few more chapters are written.
This textbook is intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods and present enough information about each method for readers to use them sensibly. We don’t attempt to give a thorough discussion of the theoretical details behind each method, although the references at the end of each chapter will fill in many of those details.
The book is written for three audiences: (1) people finding themselves doing forecasting in business when they may not have had any formal training in the area; (2) undergraduate students studying business; (3) MBA students doing a forecasting elective. We use it ourselves for a second-year subject for students undertaking a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Monash University, Australia.
For most sections, we only assume that readers are familiar with algebra, and high school mathematics should be sufficient background. Readers who have completed an introductory course in statistics will probably want to skip some of Chapters 2and 4. There are a couple of sections requiring knowledge of matrices, but these are flagged.
We use R throughout the book and we intend students to learn how to forecast with R. R is free and available on almost every operating system. It is a wonderful tool for all statistical analysis, not just for forecasting. See Using R for instructions on installing and using R.
The book is different from other forecasting textbooks in several ways.
- It is free and online, making it accessible to a wide audience.
- It is continuously updated. You don’t have to wait until the next edition for errors to be removed or new methods to be discussed. We will update the book frequently.
- There are dozens of real data examples taken from our own consulting practice. We have worked with hundreds of businesses and organizations helping them with forecasting issues, and this experience has contributed directly to many of the examples given here, as well as guiding our general philosophy of forecasting.
- We emphasise graphical methods more than most forecasters. We use graphs to explore the data, analyse the validity of the models fitted and present the forecasting results.
Use the table of contents on the right to browse the book. If you have any comments or suggestions on what is here so far, feel free to add them below.
Happy forecasting!
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