Estimation of Smoothing Constant of Minimum Variance and Its Application to Shipping Data with Trend Removal Method

Focusing on the idea that the equation of exponential smoothing method (ESM) is equivalent to (1, 1) order ARMA model equation, new method of estimation of smoothing constant in exponential smoothing method is proposed before by us which satisfies minimum variance of forecasting error. Theoretical solution was derived in a simple way. Mere application of ESM does not make good forecasting accuracy for the time series which has non-linear trend and/or trend by month. A new method to cope with this issue is required. In this paper, combining the trend removal method with this method, we aim to improve forecasting accuracy. An approach to this method is executed in the following method. Trend removal by a linear function is applied to the original shipping data of consumer goods. The combination of linear and non-linear function is also introduced in trend removal. For the comparison, monthly trend is removed after that. Theoretical solution of smoothing constant of ESM is calculated for both of the monthly trend removing data and the non monthly trend removing data. Then forecasting is executed on these data. The new method shows that it is useful especially for the time series that has stable characteristics and has rather strong seasonal trend and also the case that has non-linear trend. The effectiveness of this method should be examined in various cases.