Predicting Chinese total retail sales of consumer goods by employing an extended discrete grey polynomial model

Abstract

The total retail sales of consumer goods is not only an important indicator to measure the consumption level of the Chinese people, but also an important indicator of the national economy. Therefore, it is of great significance to analyze the development trend of Chinese total retail sales of consumer goods for the healthy development of Chinese economy. To explore the future development trend of Chinese total retail sales of consumer goods, this paper develops an extensive discrete grey model by the introduction of weighted fractional accumulation and discretization error, which is abbreviated as WFDPGM(1,1,tα) model. To further enhance the prediction performance of the proposed model, the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is employed to determine the emerging coefficients. Three real cases are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model by comparing with other competing models. Lastly, based on Chinese retail sales of consumer goods from 2005 to 2019, the numerical results show that the proposed model outperforms other benchmarks, and the future development of Chinese retail sales of consumer goods will maintain an increasing trend, reaching 533033.15×109 yuan in 2025. And some managerial insights are obtained from numerical examples.