Consider the applications for home mortgages data in the file S12_04.xlsx.
a. Create a time series chart of the data. Based on what you see, which of the exponential smoothing models do you think should be used for forecasting? Why?
b. Use simple exponential smoothing to forecast these data, using no holdout period and requesting four quarters of future forecasts. Use the default smoothing constant of 0.1.
c. Repeat part b, optimizing the smoothing constant. Does it make much of an improvement?
d. Write a short report to summarize your results.