If you’re looking to improve the way you plan your work and improve efficiency by introducing statistical forecasting, then this course is ideal. By the end of the session you will have a firm grasp of how to summarise and measure trends, as well as how to extrapolate trends into a forecast. You will also have a good understanding of how to perform relevant calculations in Excel. 

This course looks at one of the big questions in businesses -- finding out what is going to happen next. It would be so much easier to plan sales, purchases, production, staff and logistics if we knew the answer to this question! Many businesses know how important it is to forecast for the future, yet many fail to apply the fundamental concepts of statistical forecasting. Those that don’t use statistical forecasting face higher costs and uncertainty when reality diverges from their plans. Those that do use statistical forecasting are able plan for the future much more effectively and efficiently. 
 

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the distinction between sober & drunk time series (seriously!)

• Learn how to use hypothesis testing to confirm that a trend is a genuine trend.

• Learn how to use moving averages correctly to identify potential turning points.

• Discover the simplest method of identifying seasonality in your time series and to confirm it with hypothesis test.

• Uncover the basic principles of statistical process control and how you can use it to confirm deviations from an expected trend.

• Learn 4 different ways of extrapolating an existing trend to produce forecast.
   

Topics Covered

Time series analysis, forecasting, trend identification, seasonality, moving averages, trend extrapolation, statistical process control, forecasting using extrapolations.
 

Target Audience

Anyone involved in business planning, performance analysis and other similar roles that require analyses of historical trends and extrapolation of those trends to create forecasts.
 

Course Prerequisites

This course would be suitable for anyone who has completed our two day "Basic Statistics" course.

Other participants should ideally have an understanding of the following:

1. Basic statistical concepts including expectation, variance, distribution and correlation.

2. Probability and risk including knowing what false positives and false negatives are

3. Know how to calculate of confidence intervals for the mean of 1 sample and the difference in means between 2 samples.

4. Know how to calculate the slope and intercept of a simple regression models with 1 variable

5. Use of Microsoft Excel including the use of formulae such as IF, VLOOKUP, OFFSET, etc.

6. Produce and interpret line charts, column charts and scatter plots in Excel.

Nigel Marriott

Nigel Marriott is a chartered statistician who provides statistical consulting, training and data management services to clients in many industries. Nigel has accrued a wealth of experience working with research, intelligence, planning and forecasting teams within a broad range of areas such as: purchasing, finance, trading desks, sales, marketing, product design, IT, engineering, manufacturing, quality and scientific fields. This is highly unusual in any profession, but particularly for a statistician, who tend to specialise in particular fields and this has given him fluency in many varieties of technical and non-technical English. His ability to communicate with any audience from boardroom to shop floor, a high level of commercial awareness and the experience to see how one part fits into the bigger picture are some of the many reasons why his services are highly sought after both nationally and internationally.