Forecasting indices for construction activities in the heavy civil engineering industry: A joint approach methodology

There are several forms of technique available for use in the prediction of time series data and not one method can be applied to all time series. Essentially, there are only two forms of approach to forecasting: Subjective, which incorporates the judgement of 'experts' (persons who work closely with the industry or product they are set to forecast), and objective, which apply a scientific process to the analysis of previous data using a statistical approach to create 'a fit' to the historic data then applying the 'model' to predict future occurrences. The objective techniques vary in complexity. However, it does not follow that the more complex the approach the better the forecast. The author would like to state that where accuracy is required, a combination of objective statistical analyses with subjective evaluation can be shown to be the most efficient.