Related papers: Exploring the representativeness of the M5 competi…
The M5 competition uncertainty track aims for probabilistic forecasting of sales of thousands of Walmart retail goods. We show that the M5 competition data faces strong overdispersion and sporadic demand, especially zero demand. We discuss…
The recent M5 competition has advanced the state-of-the-art in retail forecasting. However, we notice important differences between the competition challenge and the challenges we face in a large e-commerce company. The datasets in our…
Retail sales forecasting presents a significant challenge for large retailers such as Walmart and Amazon, due to the vast assortment of products, geographical location heterogeneity, seasonality, and external factors including weather,…
We present our solution for the M5 Forecasting - Uncertainty competition. Our solution ranked 6\ts{th} out of 909 submissions across all hierarchical levels and ranked first for prediction at the finest level of granularity (product-store…
Accurate demand forecasting in the retail industry is a critical determinant of financial performance and supply chain efficiency. As global markets become increasingly interconnected, businesses are turning towards advanced prediction…
This paper studies cooperative data-sharing between competitors vying to predict a consumer's tastes. We design optimal data-sharing schemes both for when they compete only with each other, and for when they additionally compete with an…
In recent years, data mining researchers have developed efficient association rule algorithms for retail market basket analysis. Still, retailers often complain about how to adopt association rules to optimize concrete retail marketing-mix…
Predicting product sales of large retail companies is a challenging task considering volatile nature of trends, seasonalities, events as well as unknown factors such as market competitions, change in customer's preferences, or unforeseen…
The M6 forecasting competition, the sixth in the Makridakis' competition sequence, is focused on financial forecasting. A key objective of the M6 competition was to contribute to the debate surrounding the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH)…
Given data on the choices made by consumers for different offer sets, a key challenge is to develop parsimonious models that describe and predict consumer choice behavior while being amenable to prescriptive tasks such as pricing and…
We participated in the M4 competition for time series forecasting and describe here our methods for forecasting daily time series. We used an ensemble of five statistical forecasting methods and a method that we refer to as the correlator.…
The supermarket model refers to a system with a large number of queues, where new customers choose d queues at random and join the one with the fewest customers. This model demonstrates the power of even small amounts of choice, as compared…
This paper is concerned with a store-choice model for investigating consumers' store-choice behavior based on scanner panel data. Our store-choice model enables us to evaluate the effects of the consumer/product attributes not only on the…
We develop SHOPPER, a sequential probabilistic model of shopping data. SHOPPER uses interpretable components to model the forces that drive how a customer chooses products; in particular, we designed SHOPPER to capture how items interact…
Accurate and fast demand forecast is one of the hot topics in supply chain for enabling the precise execution of the corresponding downstream processes (inbound and outbound planning, inventory placement, network planning, etc). We develop…
Forecast evaluation plays a key role in how empirical evidence shapes the development of the discipline. Domain experts are interested in error measures relevant for their decision making needs. Such measures may produce unreliable results.…
We develop a location analysis spatial model of firms' competition in multi-characteristics space, where consumers' opinions about the firms' products are distributed on multilayered networks. Firms do not compete on price but only on…
Modern collaborative filtering algorithms seek to provide personalized product recommendations by uncovering patterns in consumer-product interactions. However, these interactions can be biased by how the product is marketed, for example…
Time series forecasting is essential for operational intelligence in the hospitality industry, and particularly challenging in large-scale, distributed systems. This study evaluates the performance of statistical, machine learning (ML),…
We analyze digital markets where a monopolist platform uses data to match multiproduct sellers with heterogeneous consumers who can purchase both on and off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their…