Exam 3: Forecasting

The owner of Yummy Yummy Catering needs to ensure she has enough employees scheduled for the upcoming week to assist with cooking. She needs to forecast the number of clients that will book her services. She has the following historical data: What is this week's forecast using a three-week simple moving average?

The dean of a school of business is forecasting total student enrollment for this year's summer session classes based on the following historical data: What is this year's forecast using exponential smoothing with alpha = 0.4, if last year's smoothed forecast was 2,600?

In order to increase the responsiveness of a forecast made using the moving average technique, the number of data points in the average should be:

The two general approaches to forecasting are:

A persistent tendency for forecasts to be greater than or less than the actual values is called:

Data in a time-ordered sequence will not be in measurements of?

Which technique is used in computing seasonal relatives?

Which of the following is not necessarily an element of a good forecast?

Professor Very Busy needs to allocate time next week to include time for office hours. He needs to forecast the number of students who will seek appointments. He has gathered the following data: What is this week's forecast using the naive approach?

Seasonal relatives can be used to deseasonalize data or incorporate seasonality in a forecast.

The forecasting method which uses anonymous questionnaires to achieve a consensus forecast is:

The T in the model TAF = S + T represents the time dimension (which is usually expressed in weeks or months).

If a pattern appears when a dependent variable is plotted against time, one should use time series analysis instead of simple linear regression.

Which is not a characteristic of simple moving averages applied to time series data?

Professor Very Busy needs to allocate time next week to include time for office hours. He needs to forecast the number of students who will seek appointments. He has gathered the following data: What is this week's forecast using the least squares trend line for these data?

Using the latest observation in a sequence of data to forecast the next period is

The owner of Darkest Tans Unlimited in a local mall is forecasting this month's (October's)demand for the one new tanning booth based on the following historical data: What is this month's forecast using exponential smoothing with alpha = 0.2, if August's forecast was 145?

An advantage of a weighted moving average is that recent actual results can be given more importance than what occurred a while ago.

Minimizing the sum of the squared deviations around the line is called:

In order to compute seasonal relatives, the trend of past data must be computed or known, which means that for brand-new products this approach cannot be used.