A Comprehensive Study on Demand Forecasting Methods and Algorithms for Retail Industries

Abstract

Without a doubt, demand forecasting is an essential part of a company’s supply chain. It predicts future demand and specifies the level of supply-side readiness needed to satisfy the demand. It is imperative that if a company’s forecasting isn’t reasonably reliable, the entire supply chain suffers. Over or under forecasted demand would have a debilitating impact on the operation of the supply chain, along with planning and logistics. Having acknowledged the importance of demand forecasting, one must look into the techniques and algorithms commonly employed to predict demand. Data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning approaches are used to extract insights from existing datasets and are used to anticipate unobserved or unknown occurrences in statistical forecasting. In this paper, the performance comparison of various forecasting techniques, time series, regression, and machine learning approaches are discussed, and the suitability of algorithms for different data patterns is examined.