Three years ago, the admissions office for Ivy College began using exponential smoothing with a smoothing constant of 0.25 to forecast the number of applications for admission each year. Based on previous experience, this process was begun with an initial estimate of 5,000 applications. The actual number of applications then turned out to be 4,600 in the first year. Thanks to new favorable ratings in national surveys, this number grew to 5,300 in the second year and 6,000 last year. (Use hand calculations below rather than an Excel template.)
(a) Determine the forecasts that were made for each of the past three years.
(b) Calculate MAD for these three years.
(c) Calculate MSE for these three years.
(d) Determine the forecast for next year.