Forecast

Amazon Forecast provides forecasting for time series data. This means things like predicting retail demand, supply chain, staffing levels, energy requirements, server capacity and web traffic. Any type of data which is time series where you have a large amount of historical and related data can be used to forecast future trends and events.

Now the way that you do this is you import historical data and related data.

Related data includes extra contextual information such as any particular events which might have been running throughout a time period and even things like the weather which can influence the data over a particular time period.

Forecast uses both of these different sets of data, historical and related, and it understands what’s normal over a particular time period.

And the output of this will be:

So this is all involved in the ability to forecast future demand based on historical data and explain why.

Forecast is a backend style service and can be interacted with using the CLI, APIs and the Python SDK.