Analysis Tools
A wide variety of analysis tools can be used to model consumer demand - from traditional statistical approaches to neural networks and data mining. Using these demand models enables estimation of future demand: forecasting. Possibly, a combination of multiple types of modeling tools may lead to the best forecasts.
Time series analysis is a statistical approach applicable for demand forecasting. This technique aims to detect patterns in the data and extend those patterns as predictions. The ARIMA model, or autoregressive integrated moving average, in particular is used both to gain understanding of the patterns in data and to predict in the series. Different parameters are used to detect linear, quadratic, and constant trends.
Other approaches for building forecast models are Neural Networks and Data Mining, which are capable of modeling even very complex relationships in data. Demand forecasting is a very complex issue for which these methods are well suited. Multilayer Perceptrons and Radial Basis Function neural networks, Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines, Machine Learning, and Tree algorithms can all generate predictive models for this application.
StatSoft has a 35 part video series on data mining that demonstrates many of these approaches for model building. While the video series mainly uses credit risk data, the series can help with learning the concepts.