Future-aware trend alignment for sales predictions

Abstract

Accurately forecasting sales is a significant challenge faced by almost all companies. In particular, most products have short lifecycles without the accumulation of historical sales data. Existing methods either fail to capture the context-specific, irregular trends or to integrate as much information as is available in the face of a data scarcity problem. To address these challenges, we propose a new model, called F-TADA, i.e., future-aware TADA, which is derived from trend alignment with dual-attention multi-task recurrent neural networks (TADA). We utilize two real-world supply chain sales data sets to verify our algorithm’s performance and effectiveness on both long and short lifecycles. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the F-TADA is better than the original model. Our model’s performance could be further improved, however, by appropriately increasing the length of the windows in the decoding stage. Finally, we develop a sales data prediction and analysis decision-making system, which can offer intelligent sales guidance to enterprises.