Exponential Smoothing: The Workhorse of Business Forecasting

Foresight is pleased to introduce a new series of tutorials on tried and true methods for business forecasting. These tutorials are designed to be nontechnical overviews of important methodologies, focused on providing insights into how the methods work and illustrating their strengths and limitations. Our hope is that they will enable forecasters to make more informed use of the software that supports the forecasting function. We lead off with Eric Stellwagen’s tutorial on Exponential Smoothing, the most fundamental of our time-series approaches to forecasting. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2012