Making Sure You Have a Useful Baseline
A baseline is a set of numeric observations made over time. Examples of baselines are:
Monthly revenue totals for the past four years
Daily hospital patient census for the past six months
Average annual liquor consumption since 1970
Number of calls to customer service per hour for the past week
In short, a baseline consists of a set of quantities measured over time. From the standpoint of forecasting, baselines have four important technical characteristics:
A baseline is ordered from the earliest observation to the most recent. This is a fairly simple requirement to meet, but you must meet it. If you have your measurements in a table where rows represent years and columns represent months, it's best to rearrange ...
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