Food Sales Prediction with Meteorological Data - A Case Study of a Japanese Chain Supermarket

The weather has a strong influence on food retailers' sales, as it affects customers emotional state, drives their purchase decisions, and dictates how much they are willing to spend. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning based method which use meteorological data to predict sales of a Japanese chain supermarket. To be specific, our method contains a long short-term memory (LSTM) network and a stacked denoising autoencoder network, both of which are used to learn how sales changes with the weathers from a large amount of history data. We showed that our method gained initial success in predicting sales of some weather-sensitive products such as drinks. Particularly, our method outperforms traditional machine learning methods by 19.3%.