Pooling and Boosting for Demand Prediction in Retail: A Transfer Learning Approach

Dazhou Lei (), Yongzhi Qi (), Sheng Liu (), Dongyang Geng (), Jianshen Zhang (), Hao Hu () and Zuo-Jun Max Shen ()
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Dazhou Lei: School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Yongzhi Qi: JD.com, Beijing 101111, China
Sheng Liu: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6, Canada
Dongyang Geng: JD.com, Beijing 101111, China
Jianshen Zhang: JD.com, Beijing 101111, China
Hao Hu: JD.com, Beijing 101111, China
Zuo-Jun Max Shen: Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2025, vol. 27, issue 6, 1779-1794

Abstract: Problem definition : How should retailers leverage aggregate (category) sales information for individual product demand prediction? Motivated by inventory risk pooling, we develop a new prediction framework that integrates category-product sales information to exploit the benefit of pooling. Methodology/results : We propose to combine data from different aggregation levels in a transfer learning framework. Our approach treats the top-level sales information as a regularization for fitting the bottom-level prediction model. We characterize the error performance of our model in linear cases and demonstrate the benefit of pooling. Moreover, our approach exploits a natural connection to regularized gradient boosting trees that enable a scalable implementation for large-scale applications. Based on an internal study with JD.com on more than 6,000 weekly observations between 2020 and 2021, we evaluate the out-of-sample forecasting performance of our approach against state-of-the-art benchmarks. The result shows that our approach delivers superior forecasting performance consistently with more than 9% improvement over the benchmark method of JD.com . We further validate its generalizability on a Walmart retail data set and through alternative pooling and prediction methods. Managerial implications : Using aggregate sales information directly may not help with product demand prediction. Our result highlights the value of transfer learning to demand prediction in retail with both theoretical and empirical support. Based on a conservative estimate of JD.com , the improved forecasts can reduce the operating cost by 0.01–0.29 renminbi (RMB) per sold unit on the retail platform, which implies significant cost savings for the low-margin e-retail business.

Keywords: retail; demand prediction; transfer learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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