Data over time
Business data arrives over time. It has a mixture of trend and noise, order and disorder, pattern and chaos. You want to tease out what the underlying trends are, and make allowance for the noise. You want to make forecasts of what’s most likely to happen, while also accounting for uncertainty.
Forecasting
Time series analysis is a tool for separating the signal from the noise. It helps you to make intelligent forecasts in the face of uncertainty. It helps you answer questions such as the following.
- How much confidence should you have in an apparent trend in your data?
- When things are moving up and down together, how can you tell whether one causes the other or whether both are a result of something else such as a seasonal pattern?
- How does uncertainty increase as you look further ahead?
If you’d like help making sense of your data and forecasting what’s likely to happen next, give us a call.
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