Time Series and Forecasting

If you wanted to predict the price of your favorite stock tomorrow you could do so by looking at patterns over the past several days, months or years. You might also incorporate economic or political factors. Time series methods seek to model expected levels of variables given past behavior and more sophisticated methods can incorporate other independent variables. Companies have numerous applications for forecasting such as call volume, sales volume, inventory levels, resource usage, expected material costs, and so on. Like most applied statistics, there a simple models and there are also highly complex approaches depending on the application.