solution

QUESTION:

1. Company A wants to test three major forecasting techniques on a historical data that they have in terms of the forecasting accuracy on a certain product’s weekly sales data. They have recorded the sales values in the last 13 weeks and you can see the corresponding value of each week as a time series data in the below table.

Period	Actual
1	141
2	104
3	145
4	147
5	150
6	150
7	132
8	136
9	108
10	103
11	113
12	141
13	121

Please use this historical data to perform the following actions:

1. Plot the time series as a scatter plot

1. Make forecasts starting from the 9^th period for five periods using moving average method (you can choose n=5; that is the number of historical data points you should use in calculation)

1. Make forecasts starting from the 9^th period for five periods using weighted moving average method (you can use the following weight scheme w_t-1= 0.3, w_t-1= 0.2, w_t-1= 0.2, w_t-1= 0.15, w_t-1= 0.15 )

1. Make forecasts starting from the 9^th period for five periods using exponential smoothing method (you can use smoothing factor as 0.25 )
2. Calculate the accuracy metrics we covered in class for all the methods you used above. Make a comparison between the techniques.