DATA4400 Forecasting For A Business Problem Assessment

Your Task

Develop a real-world forecasting project plan/proposal based on the learning from the subject.

Assessment Description

This assessment seeks to simulate a real-world task that you may have to undertake in the future. Therefore, the assignment is non-prescriptive and requires you to pose a relevant, small, creative and significant problem to solve that could result in benefits to the organization of choice.

In this assessment, you need to consider an organization in an industry of your choice and articulate the steps this organization needs to take to enable forecasting for data-driven decision making. You are required to analyse a sample data set to demonstrate expected forecasting outcomes.

You need to be familiar with the organization and industry (e.g., where you have worked or are working, a future start-up company), NOT an organization such as Amazon/Boeing/Qantas etc.

The report should address:

• Why forecasting would help this organization given their current operations.
• The forecasting technique(s) you would recommend.
• Justification of your recommended forecasting technique(s) by analysis of a relevant sample data set.
• The benefits of this forecasting project for the organisation (The benefit could be financial, such as Return on Investment (ROI) or societal benefits).

Assessment Instructions

• By Week 9 identify a company and industry you are familiar with that would benefit from a forecasting application. Note:
  • The application needs to be based on forecasting (not some other aspect of analytics).
  • Focus on a single, well defined (small) application.
  • Sample datasets maybe sourced from:
    • an organization if you work there,
    • public repositories such as kaggle.com and https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets.php,
    • Open government data such as abs.gov.au.
• By Week 12 draft some preliminary points pertaining to the report in class. You are encouraged to consider the current mode of operation, possible inefficiencies, available data and how this data may be used to provide efficiencies based on the concepts and techniques covered in the subject. Think of yourself as a consultant or a founder.
• Your lecturer will advise on the appropriateness of your choice and proposed methodology regarding the requirements for the assessment.
• Include a list of references that is directly related to the content. Each reference needs to be linked to at least one specific point in the content of your assessment. It is expected that you will have at least 10 relevant references.
• Discuss or show how ChatGPT can be leveraged to enhance your solution.