Minimum Observations and Maximum Observations (Demand Management Forecasting Profile)

Summary:

While experimenting with those parameters in the Forecast Profiles during Forecast Tuning, we observed very different MAPE results with different parameters values so we need to understand more of those two parameters

Content (please ensure you mask any confidential information):

Shipment History : 57 months (JAN2021 to SEP2025) which is 1734 days.
We tried with the defaults and obtained an high MAPE while by using 1734 days for all methods the MAPE when down by half.

We also tried with 1440 days (about 48 months, with history hoff set of 9 months) and in that case the MAPE was better than with defaults (365 days)

So the question is given that Minimum Observations is the minimum # of observations used for each method: what is the best practice? By using the defaults are we failing to use all history available? By stopping Maximum Observation before the end of History are we blocking the engine to that max # of months? Last but not least is good practice to have different values for each method?