 Retail sales forecasting with meta-learningShaohui Ma and Robert Fildes European Journal of Operational Research, 2021, vol. 288, issue 1, 111-128 Abstract: Retail sales forecasting often requires forecasts for thousands of products for many stores. We present a meta-learning framework based on newly developed deep convolutional neural networks, which can first learn a feature representation from raw sales time series data automatically, and then link the learnt features with a set of weights which are used to combine a pool of base-forecasting methods. The experiments which are based on IRI weekly data show that the proposed meta-learner provides superior forecasting performance compared with a number of state-of-art benchmarks, though the accuracy gains over some more sophisticated meta ensemble benchmarks are modest and the learnt features lack interpretability. When designing a meta-learner in forecasting retail sales, we recommend building a pool of base-forecasters including both individual and pooled forecasting methods, and target finding the best combination forecasts instead of the best individual method. Keywords: Forecasting; Big data; Retail sales forecasting; Machine learning; Forecasting many time series; Meta-learning; Deep learning (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:288:y:2021:i:1:p:111-128 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2020.05.038 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier |
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