Week 1: What is forecasting?

What you will learn this week

  • How to think about forecasting from a statistical perspective
  • What makes something easy or hard to forecast?
  • Using the tsibble package in R

Pre-class activities

Exercises (on your own or in tutorial)

Your task this week is to make sure you are familiar with R, RStudio and the tidyverse packages. If you’ve already done ETC1010, then you may not need to do anything! But if you’re new to R and the tidyverse, then you will need to get yourself up-to-speed.

Work through the first five chapters of the LearnR tutorial at learnr.numbat.space. Do as much of it as you think you need. For those students new to R, it is strongly recommended that you do all five chapters. For those who have previously used R, concentrate on the parts where you feel you are weakest.

Check your understanding quiz

Slides for seminar

Download pdf

Seminar activities

  1. Download tourism.xlsx from http://robjhyndman.com/data/tourism.xlsx, and read it into R using read_excel() from the readxl package.
  2. Create a tsibble which is identical to the tourism tsibble from the tsibble package.
  3. Find what combination of Region and Purpose had the maximum number of overnight trips on average.
  4. Create a new tsibble which combines the Purposes and Regions, and just has total trips by State.

Solutions

Assignments