Exam 8: Forecasting

Table 8.2 The Agricultural Extension Agent's Office has tracked fertilizer application and crop yields for a variety of chickpea and has recorded the data shown in the following table.Their staff statistician developed the regression model and computed the performance statistics displayed below the data. -Use the information provided in Table 8.2.The value of Fertilizer required to generate 100 bushels yield must be:

Combination forecasting is a method of forecasting that selects the best from a group of forecasts generated by simple techniques.

Three weeks of data are available from a restaurant.Develop a forecast and explain why your approach is reasonable.

Demands for a newly developed salad bar at the Great Professional restaurant for the first six months of this year are shown in the following table.What is the forecast for July if the 3-month weighted moving-average method is used? (Use weights of 0.5 for the most recent demand,0.3,and 0.2 for the oldest demand. )

Table 8.3 A textbook publisher for books used in business schools believes that the number of books sold is related to the number of campus visits to decision makers made by their sales force.A sampling of the number of sales calls made and the number of books sold is shown in the following table. -Use the information provided in Table 8.3.For every sale call made,the number of books sold increases by:

Using salesforce estimates for forecasting has the advantage that:

Graph 8.1 Data plotted in the graph appear in the table below. -Refer to Graph 8.1.What is the average demand for the second period?

Which one of the following is an example of causal forecasting technique?

If forecast errors are normally distributed with a mean of 0,the relationship between σ and MAD is:

An exponential smoothing model with an alpha equal to 1.00 is the same as a naive forecasting model.

Table 8.7 A sales manager wants to forecast monthly sales of the machines the company makes using the following monthly sales data. -Use the information in Table 8.7.Forecast the monthly sales of the machine for month 9,using the three-month moving-average method.

A regression equation with a coefficient of determination near one would be most likely to occur when the data demonstrated a:

Pho Bulous,a Vietnamese restaurant in the bustling metropolis of Edmond,has had great success using forecasting techniques to predict demand for their main menu items ever since they opened their doors.Their forecast for last month was grossly inaccurate and so far this month,their forecast appears to be just as bad as last month's.It's already time to prepare the forecast for next month,what should they do about their model?

Which one of the following statements about the patterns of a demand series is FALSE?

When forecasting total demand for all their services or products,few companies err by more than:

Table 8.1 The management of an insurance company monitors the number of mistakes made by telephone service representatives for a company they have subcontracted with.The number of mistakes for the past several months appears in this table along with forecasts for errors made with three different forecasting techniques.The column labeled Exponential was created using exponential smoothing with an alpha of 0.30.The column labeled MA is forecast using a moving average of three periods.The column labeled WMA uses a 3-month weighted moving average with weights of 0.65,0.25,and 0.10 for the most-to-least recent months. -Using Table 8.1,what is the mean absolute percent error for months 6-10 using the exponential smoothing forecasts?

Calculate three forecasts using the following data.First,for periods 4 through 10,develop the exponentially smoothed forecasts using a forecast for period 3 (F3)of 45.0 and an alpha of 0.4.Second,calculate the three-period moving-average forecast for periods 4 through 10.Third,calculate the weighted moving average for periods 4 through 10,using weights of .70,.20,and .10,with 0.70 applied to the most recent data.Calculate the mean absolute deviation (MAD)and the cumulative sum of forecast error (CFE)for each forecasting procedure.Which forecasting procedure would you select? Why?

The demand for an item over the last year is plotted below.Develop a forecast and explain why your approach is reasonable.

________ is a systematic approach to determine consumer interest in a product or service by creating and testing hypotheses through data-gathering surveys.

The ________ variable is the variable that one wants to forecast.