In the area of computer performance and capacity planning, large amounts of operational data often have to be analyzed. Data analysis using SAS has been documented many times over the years. However, the most critical area of capacity planning-forecasting resource requirements--has received minimal attention as published papers or even as an area of development by most installations. Forecastin...

3 We examine the effect of damping X-12-ARIMA's estimated seasonal variation on the accuracy of its seasonal adjustments of time series. Two methods for damping seasonals are proposed. In a simulation experiment, we generated time series data for each of 90 distinct experimental conditions that, in aggregate, characterize the variety of monthly series in the M3-competition. X-12-ARIMA consisten...

Price forecasting is an integral part of economic decision making. Forecasts may be used in numerous ways; specifically, individuals may use forecasts to try to earn income from speculative activities, to determine optimal government policies or to make business decisions. The importance of this topic is caused by instability in the world economy and stock markets; there is a growing interest i...

Forecasting hotel arrivals and occupancy is an important component in hotel revenue management systems. In this paper we propose a new Monte Carlo simulation approach for the arrivals and occupancy forecasting problem. In this approach we simulate the hotel reservations process forward in time, and these future Monte Carlo paths will yield forecast densities. A key step for the faithful emulati...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat naïve random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient outcome stems from the fact that professional forecasts are to a large extend influenced by actual cha...

Yearly electricity consumption trends of most developing countries usually exhibit approximately exponential growth curves. An optimized nonhomogeneous exponential model (ONEM) is proposed as a method of forecasting electricity consumption by using trend extrapolation. The parameters of the nonhomogeneous exponential equation are obtained by using the inverse accumulated generating operation, d...