Demand_Forecasting
Demand Forecasting is the process in which historical sales data is used to develop an estimate of an expected forecast of customer demand. To businesses, Demand Forecasting provides an estimate of the amount of goods and services that its customers will purchase in the foreseeable future. Critical business assumptions like turnover, profit margins, cash flow, capital expenditure, risk assessment and mitigation plans, capacity planning, etc. are dependent on Demand Forecasting.
Demand Forecasting is the pivotal business process around which strategic and operational plans of a company are devised. Based on the Demand Forecast, strategic and long-range plans of a business like budgeting, financial planning, sales and marketing plans, capacity planning, risk assessment and mitigation plans are formulated.
Short to medium term tactical plans like pre-building, make-to-stock, make-to-order, contract manufacturing, supply planning, network balancing, etc. are execution based. Demand Forecasting also facilitates important management activities like decision making, performance evaluation, judicious allocation of resources in a constrained environment and business expansion planning.
Challenge
One of the largest retail chains in the world wants to use their vast data source to build an efficient forecasting model to predict the sales for each SKU in its portfolio at its 76 different stores using historical sales data for the past 3 years on a week-on-week basis. Sales and promotional information is also available for each week - product and store wise.
However, no other information regarding stores and products are available. Can you still forecast accurately the sales values for every such product/SKU-store combination for the next 12 weeks accurately? If yes, then dive right in!
Dataset
Link: https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/janatahack-demand-forecasting/#ProblemStatement
Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation metric for this competition is RMLSEx100
LeaderBoard
No. of Registered: 13390
Public Leaderboard rank: 73
Private Leaderboard rank: 65
https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/janatahack-demand-forecasting/#LeaderBoard