Optimizing Sales Forecasts through Automated Integration of Market Indicators
This addresses the need for more accurate demand predictions in sales forecasting, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data without major methodological breakthroughs.
This work tackled the problem of improving sales forecasts by automatically integrating external market indicators, showing that feature selection methods like Forward Feature Selection significantly enhanced accuracy for both SARIMAX and Neural Prophet models across company datasets.
Recognizing that traditional forecasting models often rely solely on historical demand, this work investigates the potential of data-driven techniques to automatically select and integrate market indicators for improving customer demand predictions. By adopting an exploratory methodology, we integrate macroeconomic time series, such as national GDP growth, from the \textit{Eurostat} database into \textit{Neural Prophet} and \textit{SARIMAX} forecasting models. Suitable time series are automatically identified through different state-of-the-art feature selection methods and applied to sales data from our industrial partner. It could be shown that forecasts can be significantly enhanced by incorporating external information. Notably, the potential of feature selection methods stands out, especially due to their capability for automation without expert knowledge and manual selection effort. In particular, the Forward Feature Selection technique consistently yielded superior forecasting accuracy for both SARIMAX and Neural Prophet across different company sales datasets. In the comparative analysis of the errors of the selected forecasting models, namely Neural Prophet and SARIMAX, it is observed that neither model demonstrates a significant superiority over the other.