Forecasting use cases
In the context of Elastic ML, there are really just two—somewhat similar—use cases in which someone would use forecasting. These are outlined here:
- Value-focused: This is where you extrapolate a time series into the future to understand a probable future value. This would be akin to answering questions such as: “How many widgets will I sell per day 2 months from now?”
- Time-focused: This is where you understand the likely time at which an expected value is to be reached. This would answer questions similar to: “Do I expect to reach 80% utilization in the next week?”
The differences between these two use cases might not just be how a question is asked (how the data is searched), but also how you interpret the output. However, before we delve into a few examples of how to use the forecasting feature, let’s take a little time to discuss how it works logistically.
