Book Image

Minitab Cookbook

By : Isaac A Newton
Book Image

Minitab Cookbook

By: Isaac A Newton

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Minitab Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time series predictions without trends or seasonal variations


When we observe no clear trend or seasonality in the data, we can use either moving average or single exponential smoothing tools for forecasting.

The data we will use in this example are the GDP figures for the UK from 2009 to 2013. The data is provided for us in the GDP figures all.mtw worksheet and is available in the code bundle; it contains data from 1955 to 2013. We will initially subset the data for results from 2009 onwards. Then, we will use quarterly growth percentage, comparing the results from both moving average and single exponential smoothing.

The data was originally obtained from the Guardian website and is available at

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/nov/25/gdp-uk-1948-growth-economy .

How to do it…

The following steps will generate a moving average chart and a single exponential smoothing chart:

  1. Open the GDP figures all.mtw worksheet.

  2. Go to the Data menu and select Subset Worksheet.

  3. Enter 2009 onwards...