Daily retail demand forecasting using machine learning with emphasis on calendric special days

Demand forecasting is an important task for retailers as it is required for various operational decisions. One key challenge is to forecast demand on special days that are subject to vastly different demand patterns than on regular days. We present the case of a bakery chain with an emphasis on spec...

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Veröffentlicht in:International journal of forecasting Jg. 36; H. 4; S. 1420 - 1438
Hauptverfasser: Huber, Jakob, Stuckenschmidt, Heiner
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Elsevier B.V 01.10.2020
Schlagworte:
Classification
Comparative studies
Decision trees
Demand forecasting
Forecasting practice
Neural networks
Regression
Neural networks
Demand forecasting
Classification
Comparative studies
Regression
Forecasting practice
Decision trees
ISSN:0169-2070, 1872-8200
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Demand forecasting is an important task for retailers as it is required for various operational decisions. One key challenge is to forecast demand on special days that are subject to vastly different demand patterns than on regular days. We present the case of a bakery chain with an emphasis on special calendar days, for which we address the problem of forecasting the daily demand for different product categories at the store level. Such forecasts are an input for production and ordering decisions. We treat the forecasting problem as a supervised machine learning task and provide an evaluation of different methods, including artificial neural networks and gradient-boosted decision trees. In particular, we outline and discuss the possibility of formulating a classification instead of a regression problem. An empirical comparison with established approaches reveals the superiority of machine learning methods, while classification-based approaches outperform regression-based approaches. We also found that machine learning methods not only provide more accurate forecasts but are also more suitable for applications in a large-scale demand forecasting scenario that often occurs in the retail industry.
ISSN:0169-2070
1872-8200
DOI:10.1016/j.ijforecast.2020.02.005