The ability to accurately forecast data is highly desirable in a wide variety of fields such as sales, stocks, sports performance, and natural phenomena. Presented here is a study of several time series forecasting methods applied to retail sales data, comprising weekly sales figures from various Walmart department stores across the United States over a period of approximately 2 and a half year...

Because of short product life cycles, large product offerings and fickle consumer tastes, product demand in the apparel retail industry is volatile and difficult to predict. It is also thought to be impacted significantly by the presence of other products in the store, which may cannibalize or complement sales. This thesis explores the interactions among products in Zara's stores, and uses this...

Sales forecasting plays a prominent role in business planning and business strategy. The value and importance of advance information is a cornerstone of planning activity, and a well-set forecast goal can guide sale-force more efficiently. A forecasting usually depends on many factors such as the product feature, supply chain constrain, market demand, market share, promotion strategy, competiti...

In this paper we study the drivers and consequences of understaffing in retail stores by examining the longitudinal data on traffic flow, sales and store managers’ labor planning decisions of 41 stores in a large retail chain. Assuming store managers are profit-maximizing agents, we use a structural estimation technique to estimate the contribution of labor to sales and impute the cost of labor...

This paper proposes a method to automatically extract basis expressions that indicate economic trends from newspaper articles by using a statistical method. We also propose a method to classify them into positive expressions that indicate upbeat, and negative expressions that indicate downturn in economy, respectively. It is important for companies, governments and investors to predict economic...

In spite of its tremendous economic significance, the problem of sales staff schedule optimization for retail stores has received relatively scant attention. Current approaches typically attempt to minimize payroll costs by closely fitting a staffing curve derived from exogenous sales forecasts, oblivious to the ability of additional staff to (sometimes) positively impact sales. In contrast, th...

Sales forecasting is an essential topic for organizations and accurate forecasts can help to establish competitive advantage. Organizations can integrate a variety of information sources into their forecasting process. In this regard, the information search behavior of potential consumers as well as their emotions about a brand are supposed to improve forecasts. In this study, we combine these ...

his article considers the supermarket manager’s problem of forecasting demand for a product as a function of the product’s attributes and of market control variables. To forecast sales on the stock keeping unit (SKU) level, a good model should account for product attributes, historical sales levels, and store specifics, and to control for marketing mix. One of the challenges here is that many v...