📊 Forecasting Fundamentals for Analysts

A Databricks-based workshop on time series, statistical, and ML forecasting.

Presented to: Adidas North America Data Community
Date: June 2025

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🚀 What's Inside

• 👣 Forecasting foundations: when and why we forecast
• 📉 Time series 101: seasonality, trend, noise
• 📊 Model walkthroughs:
  • Naive, Moving Average
  • Holt-Winters
  • Prophet (stat + ML hybrid)
  • XGBoost (pure ML)
• 📐 Model evaluation: MAE, RMSE, prediction intervals
• 🧠 Business framing: how to choose the “right” model
• ✅ Slides + interactive quiz

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📁 Folder Structure

• notebooks/: Databricks-formatted forecasting demo
• slides/: Full PowerPoint from the training session
• images/: Visual previews of models (add your screenshots here)
• data/: (Optional) Sample data for testing or reuse

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🛠 Tech Stack

• Python, SQL
• Databricks Notebooks
• Facebook Prophet, XGBoost
• PowerPoint

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🤝 Ideal For

• Business analysts learning forecasting
• Data scientists explaining models to stakeholders
• Teams exploring ML vs statistical forecasting tradeoffs

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📫 Questions?

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or Email.