DATA4400 Data-driven Decision Making and Forecasting

Your Task

Develop a real-world forecasting project plan/proposal based on the learnings from the subject.

Assessment Description

This assessment seeks to simulate a real-world task that you may have to undertake in the future. Therefore, the assignment is non-prescriptive and requires you to pose a relevant, small, creative and significant forecasting problem to solve that could result in benefits to the organisation g choice.

In this assessment, you need to consider an organisation in an industry of your choice and articulate the steps this organisation needs to take to enable forecasting for data-driven decision making. You are required to source an example time series to demonstrate expected forecasting outcomes.

It will be much easier to pose a realistic scenario if you are familiar with the organisation and industry.

The report should address:

●The organisation you have chosen and your familiarity with its business.

● Why forecasting would help this organisation given their current operations. o

● The time series you have sourced

●The forecasting technique you would recommend, with your reasons for doing so. But you are NOT EXPECTED TO fit other forecasting models and compare error statistics; or to compare training and test error statistics.

●The results of applying your chosen technique to your time series, including visual display and the actual forecast.

●The benefits of this forecasting project for the organisation (The benefit could be financial, such as Return on Investment (ROI) or societal benefits).

Assessment Instructions

• By Week 10 identify a company and industry you are familiar with that would benefit from a forecasting application. Note:

o The application needs to be based on forecasting (not some other aspect of analytics).

o Focus on a single, well-defined (small) application.

o Sample datasets may be sourced from:

 an organisation if you work there,

 public repositories

 Open government data

 Open data such as share prices and commodity prices.

• By Week 12 draft some preliminary points about the report in class. You are encouraged to consider the current mode of operation, possible inefficiencies, available data and how this data may be used to provide efficiencies based on the concepts and techniques covered in the subject. Think of yourself as a consultant or a founder.

•    Your facilitator will advise on the appropriateness of your choice and proposed methodology regarding the requirements for the assessment.

•    Include a list of references that are directly related to the content. Each reference needs to be linked to at least one specific point in the content of your assessment. It is  expected that you will have at least 4 relevant references, web sites are ok, including a reference to the source of the data.