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Forecast Function - Why does rate of growth trail off with time???
I have 13 months worth of monthly data that I want to trend out for about 3
years on a month-by-monty basis. I am using the FORECAST function but am puzzled by what I am seeing. I get values that visually "make sense" based on the historical data, but when I calculate the month-over-month rate of change I see puzzling results. Here is the data: Apr-06 May-06 Jun-06 Jul-06 Aug-06 Sep-06 Oct-06 Nov-06 Dec-06 Jan-07 Feb-07 Mar-07 Apr-07 329 369 390 448 442 437 451 504 552 487 574 610 511 So I am projecting out to April 2010. If you try this confirm that you get 1262 as the value for April 2010. The thing that puzzles me is that if I chart this data it looks perfectly linear for the forecasted values. Thus I would expect a uniform rate of growth. But when I look at the month-over month growth rate, it steadily declines from 3.197% in Jun 2007 to 1.546% by April 2010. Can anyone help me understand what is going on? Is FORECAST the best way to do what I am atttempting? Thanks in advance for any assistance! |
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