Life-cycle forecasting for pharmaceutical drugs. A structured approach with Mathematica

The study of the lifecycle of existing pharmaceutical products within a common therapeutic category may provide some insight into the expected performance of a new drug with comparable efficacy from the medical point of view. Whenever the category is crowded, however, this approach requires the analysis of hundreds, or even thousands, of sales' time series. The aim of this report is to present a technical tool to deal with data inspection, univariate diffusion model fitting, and forecasting storage for a large number of products. This is realized with the software Mathematica (Versions 9 or 10).