Sales Forecast in E-commerce using Convolutional Neural Network
This addresses the problem of time-consuming manual feature engineering in e-commerce sales forecasting, though it is incremental as it applies an existing CNN method to a new domain.
The paper tackles sales forecasting in e-commerce by proposing a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically extract features from raw log data, achieving validated effectiveness on a real-world dataset from CaiNiao.com.
Sales forecast is an essential task in E-commerce and has a crucial impact on making informed business decisions. It can help us to manage the workforce, cash flow and resources such as optimizing the supply chain of manufacturers etc. Sales forecast is a challenging problem in that sales is affected by many factors including promotion activities, price changes, and user preferences etc. Traditional sales forecast techniques mainly rely on historical sales data to predict future sales and their accuracies are limited. Some more recent learning-based methods capture more information in the model to improve the forecast accuracy. However, these methods require case-by-case manual feature engineering for specific commercial scenarios, which is usually a difficult, time-consuming task and requires expert knowledge. To overcome the limitations of existing methods, we propose a novel approach in this paper to learn effective features automatically from the structured data using the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). When fed with raw log data, our approach can automatically extract effective features from that and then forecast sales using those extracted features. We test our method on a large real-world dataset from CaiNiao.com and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of our method.