An Evaluation of the Extended Logistic, Simple Logistic, and Gompertz Models for Forecasting Short Lifecycle Products and Services

Many successful technology forecasting models have been developed but little research has explored the relationship between sample set size and forecast prediction accuracy. This research studies the forecast accuracy of large and small data sets using the simple logisticl, Gompertz, and the extended logistic models. The performance of the models were evaluated using the mean absolute deviation and the root mean square error. A time series dataset of four electronic products and services were used to evaluate the model performance. The result shows that the extended logistic model fits large and small datasets better than the simple logistic and Gompertz models. The findings also show that that the extended logistic model is well suited to predict market growth with limited historical data as is typically the case for short lifecycle products and services.