Heavy moving average distances in sales forecasting

This paper presents a new aggregation operator tech‐ nique that uses the ordered weighted average (OWA), heavy aggregation operators, Hamming distance, and moving averages. This approach is called heavy ordered weighted moving average distance (HOWMAD). The main advantage of this operator is that it can use the characteristics of the HOWMA operator to under‐ or over‐ estimate the results according to the expectations and the knowledge of the future scenarios, analyze the his‐ torical data of the moving average, and compare the different alternatives with the ideal results of the dis‐ tance measures. Some of the main families and specific cases using generalized and quasi‐arithmetic means are presented, such as the generalized heavy moving aver‐ age distance and a generalized HOWMAD. This study develops an application of this operator in forecasting the sales growth rate for a commercial company. We find that it is possible to determine whether the company’s objectives can be achieved or must be reevaluated in response to the actual situation and future expectations of the enterprise.