ABSTRACT
The decision expands a business facility, to hire additional people and to start new programs. Often is made on the basis of meeting future forecasted demand. Forecasting future demand for a business is a multi-stage process: collection of past demand data for the business, identification of the trend in the past demand data and projection of the past demand trend into the future. Forecasts of future demand are typically based on collection of past demand data for a given system. Regression analysis in characterizing a trend in the data will examine the change in the demand data over time due to the underlying trend and due to the random effects. Statistical confidence in a trend in the demand data will increase as the amount of the change in demand over time that can be explained by the trend increases and the amount of change in demand which must be assigned to randomness decreases.
