Artificial intelligence applied to small businesses: the use of automatic feature engineering and machine learning for more accurate planning

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a predictive model that increases the accuracy of business operational planning using data from a small business. By using Machine Learning (ML) techniques feature expansion, resampling, and combination techniques, it was possible to address several existing limitations in the available research. Then, the use of the novel technique of feature engineering allowed us to increase the accuracy of the model by finding 10 new features derived from the original ones and constructed automatically through the nonlinear relationships found between them. Finally, we built a rule-based classifier to predict the store's revenue with high accuracy. The results show the proposed approach open new possibilities for ML research applied to small and medium businesses.