Question: The number of heart surgeries performed at Heartville General Hospital has increased steadily over the past years. The hospital’s administration is seeking the best method to forecast the demand for such surgeries in year 6. The data for the past five years are shown. Six years ago, the forecast for year 1 was 41 surgeries, and the estimated trend was an increase of 2 per year.

The hospital’s administration is considering the following forecasting methods.

1. Trend-adjusted exponential smoothing, with \(\alpha \) = 0.6 and \(\beta \) = 0.1.
2. Three year weighted moving average, using weights (3/6), (2/6), and (1/6),
   with more recent data given more weight.
3. Regression model, Y = 42.6 + 3.2X, where Y is the number of surgeries and X is the index for the year (e.g., X = 1 for year 1, X = 2 for year 2, etc.)

Evaluate the performances of all the methods using MAD, MSE, and MAPE and reach a conclusion on the best method to use using each performance criterion.

Price: $2.99

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 3 pages
Deliverable: Word Document