Description

This unit provides an introduction to economic forecasting techniques. The topics covered will usually include smoothing and classical decomposition methods, ARIMA, vector autoregression and leading indicators. The emphasis of the unit is on producing sound solutions to practical forecasting problems, rather than proving theoretical results. The unit material is illustrated with many applications to problems in economics and business and the assignment requires students to produce their own forecasts. Practical work is carried out using a simple statistical software package. The objective of the unit is to produce graduates who understand the nature of forecasting problems and can produce sound forcasts for use in business and economic analysis.