Predicting the Number of Mobile Subscribers: An accurate forecasting system and its application

Forecasting economic quantities can bring high benefits to business planning and operation. To provide accurate forecasts and to investigate the factors behind the trends, we present a new prediction system in this paper. Applying it to the Number of Mobile Subscribers (NMS) in the United States, China, and Germany, we observe interesting differences between saturated and emerging markets. Moreover, we find that prediction accuracy highly increases when (i) external factors are systematically included in the prediction model, while factors with ambiguous effects are removed and (ii) the time lag between a factor´s change and using it for prediction is optimized. By doing both, our system is not only more accurate than common forecasting methods but reveals if and how quickly a factor affects a trend´s accuracy.