Microsoft today announced new forecasting capabilities in Power View for Office 365 users. Power View performs advanced statistical analysis of the data in your line charts to generate forecasts that incorporate trends and seasonal factors._So how does forecasting work? Forecasting in Power View is based on an established suite of methods for time series prediction called exponential smoothing. Over the years many methods have been developed for the analysis of time series, depending on whether the data is strongly seasonal or has no seasonality, how much noise there is in the data, and whether the data contains “surprises” or irregular peaks. In Power View, you can now apply predictive forecasting, and hindcasting, when visualizing and exploring your data. Forecasting in Power View utilizes built-in predictive forecasting models using exponential smoothing to automatically detect seasonality in the data to provide forecast results from a series of data. Explore forecast results by adjusting the desired confidence interval or by adjusting outlier data to see how they affect results. You can also hindcast...

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