Forecasting and Extrapolative Modelling
LANCORD offers a variety of standard or custom-made courses, held in-house across Europe as well as at our facilities at Lancaster.
Forecasting Course: The Fundamentals of Forecasting
Apply now: Courses in November and February
This three-day couse aims to give practising forecaster
(a) the skills necessary to improve their performance and knowledge in the key areas of commonly used forecasting methods
(b) how best to evaluate forecasts and
(c) the use of expert judgement to incorporate key future events.
Those attending will be given plenty of hands-on experience of analysing data. Excel will be used together with more advanced forecasting packages. The course will include presentations and discussion of how forecasting can best be organised in a company and examine the choice of appropriate software. Attendees will be expected to carry out an analysis of their own company data series. Tutorial support will be given and in addition a new distance learning tool will be made available to improve learning. It is ideal for an organisation wishing to improve its forecasting capacity.
"The Lancaster forecasting course is a well organised programme with a variety of tutors, and a relaxed method of teaching and group discussion.
The course contents includes practical application through exercises and case studies relevant to real world issues.
Attending two separate workshop sessions allowed us to implement lessons from the first workshop and report back to tutors and fellow delegates at the second. We are now in a good position to further develop our forecasting methodology and improve forecast accuracy at British Gypsum Ltd." Russell Trueman, British Gypsum
Course participation for Barclaycard, British Gypsum, Dept. Work and Pensions, DSTL.
Organisational Forecasting Training
If your organisation is interested in developing its forecasting managers please contact Robert Fildes at the Centre here to discuss how a flexible training package can be developed which focuses on meeting the specific needs of your organisation.
The course is broken into two short blocks for convenience and to allow participants time to carry out their own analyses and to absorb the own material through practice and distance learning.
Overview of possible topics: statistical versus judgemental forecastsing, extrapolative v. explanatory, top-down v. bottom up. Weighted average methods; simple and advanced exponential smoothing; trend curve analysis; diffusion models. Regression models. Computational Intelligence: Artificial Neural Networks & Support Vector Regression. Interpreting the results and evaluating the usefulness of forecasts. Hands-on experience with EXCEL and state-of-the-art software.
More information & current dates may be obtained from the webpages of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting.
