By default, the Summary Area is displayed below the results chart or table. It indicates whether the prediction was successful or whether a warning or error condition occurred instead. The Summary Area can be used with the Filter Results feature (Filtering Results) to provide a quick overview of the status of the various forecasts. If the prediction succeeded, an accuracy rating is displayed (see About Accuracy later in this topic for details). If results are filtered, messages indicate the filtering criteria currently in effect.
Comments are displayed next to each member in the form with success, warning, or error messages at the bottom of columns or end of rows.
Statistically, the accuracy value is 100% minus the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Accuracy ranges from 0 to 100% and is 90% in the illustrated example. Ratings of 90 to 100% are considered Good, 80 to 90% are considered Fair, and 0 to 80% are considered Poor.
Notice that these ratings do not indicate whether the results of the member prediction are good or not within a planning context, only whether the quality of the prediction is good or not.
Accuracy indicates the ability of the prediction methods to pick up strong patterns in the historical data. If the data is very “noisy” with little pattern to it, the accuracy value is low. Data with regular and strong patterns has high accuracy values.
Accuracy is a relative measure that considers the magnitude of the prediction errors in relation to the range of the data. For example, the historical data may appear noisy and have apparently large prediction errors, but the peaks and valleys of the data along with the size of the prediction errors are small compared to the range of the data.