The Surgical Intensive Care Unit would like to be better prepared by forecasting the number of surgical patients they should expect. The past 15 days shows the following numbers of surgeries performed. Day Surgeries

Create the following forecasts: 2

Moving average (use 4 periods)

3 period weighted moving average with a weight of 5 for the past period, a weight of 3 for two periods ago and a weight of 1 for three periods ago. 6

Exponential smoothing with alphas of .40

Time series forecast

Additive decomposition (use 2, 3 and 4 seasons)

Day	Surgeries
1	10
2	8
3	12
4	10
5	9
6	14
7	11
8	10
9	15
10	13
11	13
12	16
13	14
14	13
15	18

4a) Complete the following table based on the output table below.

b)Which forecasting techniques appeared to do the best job for this data, explain?

method	MAD	MSE	16 day forecast
4 period Moving Avg
Weighted Moving Avg
Exp Smooth alpha=0.40
Time Series
Add Decomp 2 seasons
Add Decomp 3 seasons
Add Decomp 4 seasons