Business Analytics: Forecasting with Seasonal Baseline Smoothing

Learn how to perform seasonal baseline smoothing with R and Excel and incorporate seasonal variation for more accurate and insightful forecasts.

Introduction

• Why seasonal baseline smoothing will help your regression
• Software setup

1. Approaches to Seasonal Smoothing

• Seasonality in a baseline
• Defined names and relative references
• Diagnosing seasonality
• Simple seasonal indexes
• Seasonal smoothing and horizontal baselines

2. Optimizing Seasonal Forecasts

• Minimizing RMSE
• The Excel Forecast Sheet
• Prepare to make a seasonal forecast in R

Conclusion

• Next steps