Summary Area

By default, the Summary Area is displayed below the results chart or table. It indicates whether the prediction was successful or whether a warning or error condition occurred instead. The Summary Area can be used with the Filter Results feature (Filtering Results) to provide a quick overview of the status of the prediction. If the prediction succeeded, a quality rating is displayed (see About Prediction Accuracy later in this topic for details). If results are filtered, messages indicate the filtering criteria currently in effect.

About Prediction Accuracy

Statistically, the accuracy value is the average percentage error over the entire prediction period. Accuracy ranges from 0 to 100% and is about 90% in the illustrated example (Figure 2-3). Ratings of 95 to 100% are considered Very Good, 90 to 95% are considered good, 80 to 90% are considered Fair, and 0 to 80% are considered Poor.

Notice that these ratings do not indicate whether the results of the member prediction are good or not within a planning context, only whether the accuracy of the prediction is good or not.

Prediction accuracy is a relative measure that considers the magnitude of the prediction errors in relation to the range of the data. For example, in some cases, the historical data may appear "noisy" and have apparently large prediction errors, but the accuracy may still be considered good, because the peaks and valleys of the data and the size of the prediction errors are small relative to the entire range of the data from minimum to maximum values.