A Sales Forecasting Model for New-Released and Short-Term Product: A Case Study of Mobile Phones

Abstract

In today’s competitive market, sales forecasting of newly released and short-term products is an important challenge because there is not enough sales data. To address these challenges, we propose a sales forecasting model for new-released and short-term products and study the case of mobile phones. The main approach is to develop an integrated sales forecasting model by training the sales patterns and product characteristics of the same product category. In particular, we analyze the performance of the latest 12 machine learning models and propose the best performance model. Machine learning models have been used to compare performance through the development of Ridge, Lasso, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), AdaBoost, LightGBM, XGBoost, CatBoost, Deep Neural Network (DNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). We apply a dataset consisting of monthly sales data of 38 mobile phones obtained in the Korean market. As a result, the Random Forest model was selected as an excellent model that outperforms other models in terms of prediction accuracy. Our model achieves remarkable results with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 42.6258, a root mean square error (RMSE) of 8443.3328, and a correlation coefficient of 0.8629.