Forecasting: Extrapolation and Projection

Forecasting has many applications besides tomorrow's weather, from business to medicine to economics. There are many diverse methods and approaches taken to accomplish this task and achieve the desired end: reliable expectation. Predicting the future behavior of some processes can be much more difficult than others. In this text we will consider only those expectations that can be expressed quantitatively and for which there are existing observations. We will not consider "events" per se, especially singular ones, such as the next stock market crash or nuclear war. We will also not consider computational models which are simply run out into the future, such as is done with the weather, as these approaches are not transferable. All of the data, spreadsheets, and software are available free online.