★ APPLICATIONS ★ DIVERS ★ FORECASTING|Popular Computing Weekly) ★ |
| Forecasting | Applications Divers |
Hard work and miracles forecast It can be argued that regression analysis is, or should be. an important tool for any business interested in making predictions about sales, etc, or that wants to find out which components of their business strategy seems to be contributing most or least to their success. Forecasting -comes from the Amstat stable, publishers, of tremendous value statistical packages for home users. This particular package deals with aspects of multiple and linear regression analysis - so why isn't it called Regression Analysis? The answer is that unlike many statistical techniques which have a largely technical or scientific application regression is a means of studying trends in data and the possible uses are too widespread for it to be limited to specialist applications. To help reduce costs Amstat manuals are usually rather brief. Beyond teaching the mechanics of the program you are just pointed towards suitable textbooks for more detailed information on the way different tests work. Fortunately, bearing in mind the possible lack of training and heavy demands on the time of business users Forecasting is accompanied by a very clearly written and easy to follow manual which succeeds in being both educational and practically orientated. The result is that within about half an hour you can perform extremely complex computations on your data with only a few simple keypresses. As with any statistical package the quality of the results really depends on the value of the data you are able to enter and forecasting cannot be expected to provide magic answers without some hard work on your part. However on the whole this is probably the strongest Amstat release yet, high powered tests at extremely low prices and backed up by much improved documentation. Tony Kendle , PopularComputingWeekly860814
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