Forecasting: principles and practice: An online textbook by Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos.
From the preface:
Welcome to our new online textbook on forecasting. This book is intended as a replacement for Makridakis, Wheelwright and Hyndman (Wiley 1998).
The entire book is available online and free-of-charge. Of course, we won’t make much money doing this, but textbooks never make much money anyway — the publishers make all the money. We’d rather create something that is widely used and useful, than have large publishers profit from our efforts.
Eventually a print version of the book will be available to purchase on Amazon, but not until a few more chapters are written.
This textbook is intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods and present enough information about each method for readers to use them sensibly. We don’t attempt to give a thorough discussion of the theoretical details behind each method, although the references at the end of each chapter will fill in many of those details.
The book is written for three audiences: (1) people finding themselves doing forecasting in business when they may not have had any formal training in the area; (2) undergraduate students studying business; (3) MBA students doing a forecasting elective. We use it ourselves for a second-year subject for students undertaking a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Monash University, Australia.
Should be a useful resource for learning the forecasting “lingo” in a business context. Or for learning forecasting for that matter.
The middle chapters on regression, as the authors point out, are unfinished by they hope to have the book complete by the end of 2012.
It could be a really nice gesture on our part if we all read a chapter or so and suggested corrections to improvements to the prose.