Course Overview
A forecast in contact centers consists of
multiple components: trend, seasonality, events, and error (noise). In this four-hour
course, we focus on the trend part and help you to go through the most commonly
used and efficient forecasting methods on how to identify the forecast the
trend: exponential smoothing, holt method, holt-winter method, and linear
regression.
Because the linear regression method is
very useful also in other domains than forecasting, and it can also be flexible
to take seasonality and events into consideration, it will be discussed
profoundly. If you are interested in long-term forecasting, the trend
prediction should also take trend damping into account, which is addressed as
the last topic of this course.
This course requires you to have knowledge
of variability and how to evaluate a forecast. Therefore, we strongly suggest
you finish the preceding courses of Theory of Variability, Forecasting Overview,
and Forecasting Objectives.
In this course, we start with a quiz to find
out whether you have enough pre-requisite knowledge to actually start the course.
This course is one of the seven courses in
the Forecasting Training.