Parameters Optimization Using Genetic Algorithms in Support Vector Regression for Sales Volume Forecasting

Budgeting planning plays an important role in coordinating activities in organizations. An accurate sales volume forecasting is the key to the entire budgeting process. All of the other parts of the master budget are dependent on the sales volume forecasting in some way. If the sales volume forecasting is sloppily done, then the rest of the budgeting process is largely a waste of time. Therefore, the sales volume forecasting process is a critical one for most businesses, and also a difficult area of management. Most of researches and companies use the statistical methods, regression analysis, or sophisticated computer simulations to analyze the sales volume forecasting. Recently, various prediction Artificial Intelligent (AI) techniques have been proposed in forecasting. Support Vector Regression (SVR) has been applied successfully to solve problems in numerous fields and proved to be a better prediction model. However, the select of appropriate SVR parameters is difficult. Therefore, to improve the accuracy of SVR, a hybrid intelligent support system based on evolutionary computation to solve the difficulties involved with the parameters selection is presented in this research. Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are used to optimize free parameters of SVR. The experimental results indicate that GA-SVR can achieve better forecasting accuracy and performance than traditional SVR and artificial neural network (ANN) prediction models in sales volume forecasting.