In a variety of business situations, the introduction or improvement of machine learning approaches is impaired as these cannot draw on existing analytical models. However, in many cases similar problems may have already been solved elsewhere-but the accumulated analytical knowledge cannot be tapped to solve a new problem, e.g., because of privacy barriers. For the particular purpose of sales forecasting for similar entities, we propose a transfer machine learning approach based on additive regression models that lets new entities benefit from models of existing entities. We evaluate the approach on a rich, multi-year dataset of multiple restaurant branches. We differentiate the options to simply transfer models from one branch to another ("zero shot") or to transfer and adapt them. We analyze feasibility and performance against several forecasting benchmarks. The results show the potential of the approach to exploit the collectively available analytical knowledge. Thus, we contribute an approach that is generalizable beyond sales forecasting and the specific use case in particular. In addition, we demonstrate its feasibility for a typical use case as well as the potential for improving forecasting quality. These results should inform academia, as they help to leverage knowledge across various entities, and have immediate practical application in industry.
Time-series forecasting is an important task in both academic and industry, which can be applied to solve many real forecasting problems like stock, water-supply, and sales predictions. In this paper, we study the case of retailers' sales forecasting on Tmall|the world's leading online B2C platform. By analyzing the data, we have two main observations, i.e., sales seasonality after we group different groups of retails and a Tweedie distribution after we transform the sales (target to forecast). Based on our observations, we design two mechanisms for sales forecasting, i.e., seasonality extract…
We took part in the Corporacion Favorita Grocery Sales Forecasting competition hosted on Kaggle and achieved the 2nd place. In this abstract paper, we present an overall analysis and solution to the underlying machine-learning problem based on time series data, where major challenges are identified and corresponding preliminary methods are proposed. Our approach is based on the adaptation of dilated convolutional neural network for time series forecasting. By applying this technique iteratively to batches of n examples, a big amount of time series data can be eventually processed with a decent…
Sales forecasting is the prerequisite for a lot of managerial decisions such as production planning, material resource planning and budgeting in the supply chain. Promotions are one of the most important business strategies that are often used to boost sales. While promotions are attractive for generating demand, it is often difficult to forecast demand in their presence. In the past few decades, several quantitative models have been developed to forecast sales including statistical and machine learning models. However, these methods may not be adequate to account for all the internal and exte…
Log and square root transformations of target variable are routinely used in forecasting models to predict future sales. These transformations often lead to better performing models. However, they also introduce a systematic negative bias (under-forecasting). In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of this bias, dive deep into its root cause and introduce two methods to correct for the bias. We conclude that the proposed bias correction methods improve model performance (by up to 50%) and make a case for incorporating bias correction in modeling workflow. We also experiment with `Tweedie' …
Ivan Franko National University of Lviv（利沃夫伊万·弗兰科国立大学）
The paper describes the deep learning approach for forecasting non-stationary time series with using time trend correction in a neural network model. Along with the layers for predicting sales values, the neural network model includes a subnetwork block for the prediction weight for a time trend term which is added to a predicted sales value. The time trend term is considered as a product of the predicted weight value and normalized time value. The results show that the forecasting accuracy can be essentially improved for non-stationary sales with time trends using the trend correction block i…
Time series forecasting (TSF) is fundamentally required in many real-world applications, such as electricity consumption planning and sales forecasting. In e-commerce, accurate time-series sales forecasting (TSSF) can significantly increase economic benefits. TSSF in e-commerce aims to predict future sales of millions of products. The trend and seasonality of products vary a lot, and the promotion activity heavily influences sales. Besides the above difficulties, we can know some future knowledge in advance except for the historical statistics. Such future knowledge may reflect the influence o…
Accurate and fast demand forecast is one of the hot topics in supply chain for enabling the precise execution of the corresponding downstream processes (inbound and outbound planning, inventory placement, network planning, etc). We develop three alternatives to tackle the problem of forecasting the customer sales at day/store/item level using deep learning techniques and the Corporación Favorita data set, published as part of a Kaggle competition. Our empirical results show how good performance can be achieved by using a simple sequence to sequence architecture with minimal data preprocessing …
Info Studio d.o.o.（Info Studio 公司）；University of Sarajevo（萨拉热窝大学）
By successfully solving the problem of forecasting, the processes in the work of various companies are optimized and savings are achieved. In this process, the analysis of time series data is of particular importance. Since the creation of Facebook's Prophet, and Amazon's DeepAR+ and CNN-QR forecasting models, algorithms have attracted a great deal of attention. The paper presents the application and comparison of the above algorithms for sales forecasting in distribution companies. A detailed comparison of the performance of algorithms over real data with different lengths of sales history wa…
Demand forecasting applications have immensely benefited from the state-of-the-art Deep Learning methods used for time series forecasting. Traditional uni-modal models are predominantly seasonality driven which attempt to model the demand as a function of historic sales along with information on holidays and promotional events. However, accurate and robust sales forecasting calls for accommodating multiple other factors, such as natural calamities, pandemics, elections, etc., impacting the demand for products and product categories in general. We propose a multi-modal sales forecasting network…
Choosing the technique that is the best at forecasting your data, is a problem that arises in any forecasting application. Decades of research have resulted into an enormous amount of forecasting methods that stem from statistics, econometrics and machine learning (ML), which leads to a very difficult and elaborate choice to make in any forecasting exercise. This paper aims to facilitate this process for high-level tactical sales forecasts by comparing a large array of techniques for 35 times series that consist of both industry data from the Coca-Cola Company and publicly available datasets. …
Probabilistic time-series models become popular in the forecasting field as they help to make optimal decisions under uncertainty. Despite the growing interest, a lack of thorough analysis hinders choosing what is worth applying for the desired task. In this paper, we analyze the performance of three prominent probabilistic time-series models for sales forecasting. To remove the role of random chance in architecture's performance, we make two experimental principles; 1) Large-scale dataset with various cross-validation sets. 2) A standardized training and hyperparameter selection. The experime…
Comparative Analysis of Modern Machine Learning Models for Retail Sales Forecasting
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb（Zagreb大学电气工程与计算学院）；It From Bit d.o.o.（It From Bit公司）；Babson College（巴布森学院）；mStart Plus d.o.o.（mStart Plus公司）
Two major challenges in demand forecasting are product cannibalization and long term forecasting. Product cannibalization is a phenomenon in which high demand of some products leads to reduction in sales of other products. Long term forecasting involves forecasting the sales over longer time frame that is critical for strategic business purposes. Also, conventional methods, for instance, recurrent neural networks may be ineffective where train data size is small as in the case in this study. This work presents XGBoost-based three-stage framework that addresses product cannibalization and assoc…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Hierarchical forecasting (HF) is needed in many situations in the supply chain (SC) because managers often need different levels of forecasts at different levels of SC to make a decision. Top-Down (TD), Bottom-Up (BU) and Optimal Combination (COM) are common HF models. These approaches are static and often ignore the dynamics of the series while disaggregating them. Consequently, they may fail to perform well if the investigated group of time series are subject to large changes such as during the periods of promotional sales. We address the HF problem of predicting real-world sales time series…
Generating accurate and reliable sales forecasts is crucial in the E-commerce business. The current state-of-the-art techniques are typically univariate methods, which produce forecasts considering only the historical sales data of a single product. However, in a situation where large quantities of related time series are available, conditioning the forecast of an individual time series on past behaviour of similar, related time series can be beneficial. Since the product assortment hierarchy in an E-commerce platform contains large numbers of related products, in which the sales demand patter…
In this work we propose the use of quantile regression and dilated recurrent neural networks with temporal scaling (MQ-DRNN-s) and apply it to the inventory management task. This model showed a better performance of up to 3.2\% over a statistical benchmark (the quantile autoregressive model with exogenous variables, QAR-X), being better than the MQ-DRNN without temporal scaling by 6\%. The above on a set of 10,000 time series of sales of El Globo over a 53-week horizon using rolling windows of 7-day ahead each week.
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
In time series forecasting, decomposition-based algorithms break aggregate data into meaningful components and are therefore appreciated for their particular advantages in interpretability. Recent algorithms often combine machine learning (hereafter ML) methodology with decomposition to improve prediction accuracy. However, incorporating ML is generally considered to sacrifice interpretability inevitably. In addition, existing hybrid algorithms usually rely on theoretical models with statistical assumptions and focus only on the accuracy of aggregate predictions, and thus suffer from accuracy …
The M5 competition uncertainty track aims for probabilistic forecasting of sales of thousands of Walmart retail goods. We show that the M5 competition data faces strong overdispersion and sporadic demand, especially zero demand. We discuss resulting modeling issues concerning adequate probabilistic forecasting of such count data processes. Unfortunately, the majority of popular prediction methods used in the M5 competition (e.g. lightgbm and xgboost GBMs) fails to address the data characteristics due to the considered objective functions. The distributional forecasting provides a suitable mode…
Time-series forecasting has been an important research domain for so many years. Its applications include ECG predictions, sales forecasting, weather conditions, even COVID-19 spread predictions. These applications have motivated many researchers to figure out an optimal forecasting approach, but the modeling approach also changes as the application domain changes. This work has focused on reviewing different forecasting approaches for telemetry data predictions collected at data centers. Forecasting of telemetry data is a critical feature of network and data center management products. Howeve…
University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；Marquette University（马凯特大学）
Predicting product sales of large retail companies is a challenging task considering volatile nature of trends, seasonalities, events as well as unknown factors such as market competitions, change in customer's preferences, or unforeseen events, e.g., COVID-19 outbreak. In this paper, we benchmark forecasting models on historical sales data from Walmart to predict their future sales. We provide a comprehensive theoretical overview and analysis of the state-of-the-art timeseries forecasting models. Then, we apply these models on the forecasting challenge dataset (M5 forecasting by Kaggle). Spec…
Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Transformers have been actively studied for time-series forecasting in recent years. While often showing promising results in various scenarios, traditional Transformers are not designed to fully exploit the characteristics of time-series data and thus suffer some fundamental limitations, e.g., they generally lack of decomposition capability and interpretability, and are neither effective nor efficient for long-term forecasting. In this paper, we propose ETSFormer, a novel time-series Transformer architecture, which exploits the principle of exponential smoothing in improving Transformers for …
Ivan Franko National University of Lviv（利沃夫伊万·弗兰科国立大学）
In the survey we consider the case studies on sales time series forecasting, the deep learning approach for forecasting non-stationary time series using time trend correction, dynamic price and supply optimization using Q-learning, Bitcoin price modeling, COVID-19 spread impact on stock market, using social networks signals in analytics. The use of machine learning and Bayesian inference in predictive analytics has been analyzed.
Being able to interpret a machine learning model is a crucial task in many applications of machine learning. Specifically, local interpretability is important in determining why a model makes particular predictions. Despite the recent focus on AI interpretability, there has been a lack of research in local interpretability methods for time series forecasting while the few interpretable methods that exist mainly focus on time series classification tasks. In this study, we propose two novel evaluation metrics for time series forecasting: Area Over the Perturbation Curve for Regression and Ablati…
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；Umeå University（于默奥大学）
Machine learning-based systems are rapidly gaining popularity and in-line with that there has been a huge research surge in the field of explainability to ensure that machine learning models are reliable, fair, and can be held liable for their decision-making process. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are typically deployed to debug black-box machine learning models but in comparison to tabular, text, and image data, explainability in time series is still relatively unexplored. The aim of this study was to achieve and evaluate model agnostic explainability in a time series fore…
Time series forecasting is widely used in business intelligence, e.g., forecast stock market price, sales, and help the analysis of data trend. Most time series of interest are macroscopic time series that are aggregated from microscopic data. However, instead of directly modeling the macroscopic time series, rare literature studied the forecasting of macroscopic time series by leveraging data on the microscopic level. In this paper, we assume that the microscopic time series follow some unknown mixture probabilistic distributions. We theoretically show that as we identify the ground truth lat…
RAVEN: A Regime-Aware Variable-context Expert Network for Financial Time Series Forecasting
University of Science and Technology of China（科学技术大学）；Shanghai Black Wing Asset Management Co., Ltd.（上海黑翼资产管理有限公司）；College of Sciences, Shanghai University（上海大学理学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Qitan Technology Co., Ltd.（启元科技有限公司）
Time series data is being used everywhere, from sales records to patients' health evolution metrics. The ability to deal with this data has become a necessity, and time series analysis and forecasting are used for the same. Every Machine Learning enthusiast would consider these as very important tools, as they deepen the understanding of the characteristics of data. Forecasting is used to predict the value of a variable in the future, based on its past occurrences. A detailed survey of the various methods that are used for forecasting has been presented in this paper. The complete process of f…
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（赛富时亚洲研究院）
The fast adaptation capability of deep neural networks in non-stationary environments is critical for online time series forecasting. Successful solutions require handling changes to new and recurring patterns. However, training deep neural forecaster on the fly is notoriously challenging because of their limited ability to adapt to non-stationary environments and the catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge. In this work, inspired by the Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory, we propose Fast and Slow learning Networks (FSNet), a holistic framework for online time-series forecasting to s…
Leveraging Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Store Sales Forecasting
Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Bombay（印度博亚理工大学化学工程系）；Rajiv Gandhi University（拉吉夫·甘地大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Palmer Research Laboratories（帕勒尔研究实验室）
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Schwarz IT KG（施瓦茨信息技术有限公司）
Data-driven methods -- such as machine learning and time series forecasting -- are widely used for sales forecasting in the food retail domain. However, for newly introduced products insufficient training data is available to train accurate models. In this case, human expert systems are implemented to improve prediction performance. Human experts rely on their implicit and explicit domain knowledge and transfer knowledge about historical sales of similar products to forecast new product sales. By applying the concept of Transfer Learning, we propose an analytical approach to transfer knowledge…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；AWS AI Labs, Amazon Research（亚马逊研究院AWS人工智能实验室）
Probabilistic time series forecasting has played critical role in decision-making processes due to its capability to quantify uncertainties. Deep forecasting models, however, could be prone to input perturbations, and the notion of such perturbations, together with that of robustness, has not even been completely established in the regime of probabilistic forecasting. In this work, we propose a framework for robust probabilistic time series forecasting. First, we generalize the concept of adversarial input perturbations, based on which we formulate the concept of robustness in terms of bounded…
COVID-19 has been one of the most severe diseases, causing a harsh pandemic all over the world, since December 2019. The aim of this study is to evaluate the value of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks in forecasting the total number of COVID-19 cases in Turkey. The COVID-19 data for 30 days, between March 24 and April 23, 2020, are used to estimate the next fifteen days. The mean absolute error of the LSTM Network for 15 days estimation is 1,69$\pm$1.35%. Whereas, for the same data, the error of the Box-Jenkins method is 3.24$\pm$1.56%, Prophet method is 6.88$\pm$4.96% and Holt-Winters Ad…
Time Series Forecasting is at the core of many practical applications such as sales forecasting for business, rainfall forecasting for agriculture and many others. Though this problem has been extensively studied for years, it is still considered a challenging problem due to complex and evolving nature of time series data. Typical methods proposed for time series forecasting modeled linear or non-linear dependencies between data observations. However it is a generally accepted notion that no one method is universally effective for all kinds of time series data. Attempts have been made to use d…
