Forecast Analysis for Sales in Large-Scale Retail Trade

In large-scale retail trade, a very significant problem consists in analyzing the response of clients to product promotions. The aim of the project described in this work is the extraction of forecasting models able to estimate the volume of sales involving a product under promotion, together with a prediction of the risk of out of stock events, in which case the sales forecast should be considered potentially underestimated. Our approach consists in developing a multi-class classifier with ordinal classes (lower classes represent smaller numbers of items sold) as opposed to more traditional approaches that translate the problem to a binary-class classification. In order to do that, a proper discretization of sales values is studied, and ad hoc quality measures are provided in order to evaluate the accuracy of forecast models taking into consideration the order of classes. Finally, an overall system for end users is sketched, where the forecasting functionalities are organized in an integrated dashboard.