Time Series Analysis

Time Series Analysis is a handy tool in the business intelligence toolbox, especially when you want to understand how things change over, well, time. Imagine you’ve got records of your weekly sales for the past five years – that’s a time series. Time series analysis is all about looking for patterns in this data, like whether sales spike every summer or dip in the winter, or if a new advertising campaign caused a jump in sales.

In data analytics, this type of analysis is used to forecast future trends based on past patterns. It’s a bit like weather forecasting for business data. By identifying regular patterns, like seasonal effects or longer-term trends, businesses can make predictions about future performance. This can help with everything from setting sales targets to managing inventory levels.

Time series analysis can also help spot anomalies, which are like the odd days when the weather doesn’t match the season. In business terms, this might be a sudden drop in sales when you’d expect them to be high. Discovering and understanding these can be super useful for a business to quickly react to unexpected changes in the market or within the company itself.