 Considerations of a retail forecasting practitionerBrian Seaman International Journal of Forecasting, 2018, vol. 34, issue 4, 822-829 Abstract: Forecasts can be used in an extraordinarily diverse range of ways across many domains in which forecasting practitioners work continuously towards improving their forecasts. Each of these domains may require the analysis of different kinds of inputs and special considerations. Even within a given domain, such as retail, there may be many similar use cases of the same kind of forecast, which can lead to practitioners making different decisions. This paper discusses several of the important decision points that practitioners must work through and uses item-level sales forecasting in the retail domain as leveraged by pricing and inventory management as examples of the different paths that may be taken. It considers how each use can lead to a different forecasting objective, and a corresponding focus on different error metrics. In addition, there are several tradeoffs in the forecasting methods that are used to meet each of the objectives best, including the kinds of models used, the running time speed, and forecast accuracy requirements. Keywords: Demand forecasting; Error measures; Sales forecasting; Seasonality; Supply chain (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:intfor:v:34:y:2018:i:4:p:822-829 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2018.03.001 Access Statistics for this article International Journal of Forecasting is currently edited by R. J. Hyndman More articles in International Journal of Forecasting from Elsevier |
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