For even more free stuff and the latest multivariate forecasting and data mining solutions please visit my web site http://www.geocities.com/aforecasts

About

Hello and welcome to Caster®, very easy-to-use yet effective forecasting solution designed as MS Excel Worksheet. It's smart, powerful, robust and almost free!

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Some history

I've made Caster® a couple of years ago in the Russian Academy of Science on an order from the large Russian bank. Since then it was widely used by government agencies, financial institutions and private firms.

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Install notes

Caster® is distributed as a zip archive. The archive contains two files: forecast.xls and arima.dll. File forecast.xls is the Excel'97 worksheet which gives the interface to the model. You'll need Excel'97 or above installed. Clone and rename forecast.xls as needed to make new models. The file arima.dll must be somewhere on your path. You may copy it to the Windows system folder.

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To put it work...

Just do the following:

• open the workbook in Excel
• go to the worksheet named "data"
• make sure that the old data are completely removed
• copy and paste your own data in the first two columns
• click "calculate" button
• enjoy the forecast in the third column after the last data point
• observe the backforecasts in the same column to verify the quality

Confused? Then open Caster® to see that it's much simpler than the above instructions!

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Live scenario modelling

The flexibility and power of the Caster® modelling interface gives you the unique chance to literally "touch" the future. This is achieved through the built-in mechanism of visual scenario modelling. Just open the chart and try to move any data point: all forecasts will lively respond tracking the input changes!

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What's behind the curtain

For you folks who feel comfortable with high math, Caster® is the in-box expert system which automatically analyses the data, detects trends, seasonal components and searches for the autoregressive and integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to optimize forecast. All that written in C++ and compiled into a highly optimized program module directly available from within Excel. Rare commercial packages costing up to $10000 can offer comparable interface, quality and performance.

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Terms of use

Caster® is shareware with limited number of working sessions. You can run it free of charge 100 times without any functional limitations. Then you must buy a legal copy (only $20). Yor registration shall be valid for all future releases of Caster®. If you would like to purchase a license for Caster® you can order on-line througt the secure HTTP protocol at:

https://secure.element5.com/register.html?productid=142555&language=English

If you are not yet on-line, you can place your order by phone, fax or postal mail. Just fill the order form.

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Boris G. Zinchenko © 1998
e-mail: econexpert@mtu-net.ru
phone: +7 (095) 339-28-58