Enhancing Recurrent Neural Network Efficacy in Online Sales Predictions with Exploratory Data Analysis

Abstract

Online sales forecasting has become an essential aspect of effective business planning in the digital era. The widespread adoption of digital transformation has enabled companies to collect substantial datasets related to consumer behavior, market trends, and sales drivers. This study attempts to uncover patterns and predict sales growth by utilizing product images and their associated filenames as input. To achieve this, we use EDA combined with LSTM and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), which excel in processing sequential data. However, the performance of these networks is significantly affected by the quality of data and the preprocessing methods applied. This study highlights the importance of Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and Ensemble Methods in enhancing the efficacy of RNNs for online sales forecasting. EDA plays a crucial role in identifying significant patterns such as trends, seasonality, and autocorrelation while addressing data irregularities such as missing values and outliers. These findings show that integrating EDA substantially improves the performance metrics of RNN, as indicated by the reduction in loss and mean absolute error (MAE) values across training epochs (e.g. loss: 0.0720, MAE: 0.1918 at epoch 15). These results indicate that EDA improves the accuracy, stability, and efficiency of the model, allowing RNN to provide more reliable sales predictions while minimizing the risk of overfitting.