Automation of Best-Fit Model Selection using a Bag of Machine Learning Libraries for Sales Forecasting

Abstract

Sales forecasting became crucial for industries in past decades with rapid globalization, widespread adoption of information technology towards e-business, understanding market fluctuations, meeting business plans, and avoiding loss of sales. This research precisely predicts the automotive industry sales using a bag of multiple machine learning and time series algorithms coupled with historical sales and auxiliary features. Three-year historical sales data (from 2017 till 2020) were used for the model building or training, and one-year (2020-2021) predictions were computed for 900 unique SKU's (stock-keeping units). In the present study, the SKU is a combination of sales office, core business field, and material customer group. Various data cleaning and exploratory data analysis algorithms were implemented over raw datasets before use for modeling. Mean absolute percentage error (mape) were estimated for individual predictions from time series and machine learning models. The best model was selected for unique SKU's as per the most negligible mape value.