Walmart Inc. is an American multinational retail corporation. It is one of the largest retail corporation in the world, which was founded by Sam Walton in year 1962. And, it has revenue over $485.87 billion dollars recorded in 2016. Walmart runs three types of stores based on number items namely hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores.
One challenge of modeling retail data is the need to make decisions based on limited history. If Christmas comes but once a year, so does the chance to see how strategic decisions impacted the bottom line.
Here historical sales data provided for 45 Walmart stores located in different regions. Each store contains many departments, and participants must project the sales for each department in each store. To add to the challenge, selected holiday markdown events are included in the dataset. These markdowns are known to affect sales, but it is challenging to predict which departments are affected and the extent of the impact.
We have the following informations from walmart in different tables:
You are provided with historical sales data for 45 Walmart stores located in different regions. Each store contains a number of departments, and you are tasked with predicting the department-wide sales for each store.
In addition, Walmart runs several promotional markdown events throughout the year. These markdowns precede prominent holidays, the four largest of which are the Super Bowl, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The weeks including these holidays are weighted five times higher in the evaluation than non-holiday weeks. Part of the challenge presented by this competition is modeling the effects of markdowns on these holiday weeks in the absence of complete/ideal historical data.
- stores.csv
This file contains anonymized information about the 45 stores, indicating the type and size of store.
- train.csv
This is the historical training data, which covers to 2010-02-05 to 2012-11-01. Within this file you will find the following fields:
Store - the store number
Dept - the department number
Date - the week
Weekly_Sales - sales for the given department in the given store (TARGET VARIABLE)
IsHoliday - whether the week is a special holiday week
- test.csv
This file is identical to train.csv, except we have withheld the weekly sales. You must predict the sales for each triplet of store, department, and date in this file.
- features.csv
This file contains additional data related to the store, department, and regional activity for the given dates. It contains the following fields:
Store - the store number
Date - the week
Temperature - average temperature in the region
Fuel_Price - cost of fuel in the region
MarkDown1-5 - anonymized data related to promotional markdowns that Walmart is running. MarkDown data is only available after Nov 2011, and is not available for all stores all the time. Any missing value is marked with an NA.
CPI - the consumer price index
Unemployment - the unemployment rate
IsHoliday - whether the week is a special holiday week
For convenience, the four holidays fall within the following weeks in the dataset (not all holidays are in the data):
Super Bowl: 12-Feb-10, 11-Feb-11, 10-Feb-12, 8-Feb-13
Labor Day: 10-Sep-10, 9-Sep-11, 7-Sep-12, 6-Sep-13
Thanksgiving: 26-Nov-10, 25-Nov-11, 23-Nov-12, 29-Nov-13
Christmas: 31-Dec-10, 30-Dec-11, 28-Dec-12, 27-Dec-13