SJSU Facebook Forecasting & how Each Forecast Method Is Derived Discussion

The approach for Facebook forecasting is quantitative, which involves the projection of historical data or the development of associated models that attempt to utilize causal variables to make a forecast (Stevenson, 2018). We collect data from the 2019 and 2017, 10K reports of Facebook. From the 10K reports, we select sales data from the Quarterly Results of Operations. With these data, we select the forecasting technique of Time-Series Forecasts, which “simply attempts to project past experience into the future”(Stevenson, 2018) to further the forecasting process. However, these historical data do not always have smooth trends. There is some amount of variation and individual data that are too high or too low to have a set of smooth data. According to the textbook, Operations Management 14th Edition, averaging techniques work the best when series trends vary about on average. These techniques can offset the individual highs and lows in data when they are combined into an average (Stevenson, 2018). With these average techniques, we have three forecasting methods to analyze the sales of Facebook for 2020. These are Moving Average, Weighted Moving Average (Wt. Mov. Avg), and Exponential Smoothing (Exp. Smoothing) methods. (please continue the paragraph by briefly talking about what is Linear Trend, and TAD,)