Clothing Sales Forecast Considering Weather Information: An Empirical Study in Brick-and-Mortar Stores by Machine-Learning

Abstract

Reliable sales forecasts are important to the garment industry. In recent years, the global climate is warming, the weather changes frequently, and clothing sales are affected by weather fluctuations. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether weather data can improve the accuracy of product sales and to establish a corresponding clothing sales forecasting model. This model uses the basic attributes of clothing product data, historical sales data, and weather data. It is based on a random forest, XGB, and GBDT adopting a stacking strategy. We found that weather information is not useful for basic clothing sales forecasts, but it did improve the accuracy of seasonal clothing sales forecasts. The MSE of the dresses, down jackets, and shirts are reduced by 86.03%, 80.14%, and 41.49% on average. In addition, we found that the stacking strategy model outperformed the voting strategy model, with an average MSE reduction of 49.28%. Clothing managers can use this model to forecast their sales when they make sales plans based on weather information.