A forecasting method of multi-category product sales: analysis and application

To solve the problems of high prediction costs and difficult practices in multi-category product classification in the retail industry, optimize the inventory, and improve resilience, this work introduces a forecasting method for multi-category product sales. The forecasting method divides the data into a category set and a numerical set, uses the stacking strategy, and combines it with catboost, decision tree, and extreme gradient boosting. During the feature engineering process, the ratio and classification features are added to the category feature set; the sales at t are used for training to obtain the prediction at (t + 1); and the features used in the prediction at time (t + 1) are generated by the prediction results at t. The update processes of the two sets are combined to form a joint feature update mechanism, and multiple features of k categories are jointly updated. Using this method, data of all categories of retail stores can be linked so that historical data of different categories of goods can provide support for the prediction of each category of goods and solve the problem of insufficient product data and features. The method is verified on the retail sales data obtained from the Kaggle platform, and the mean absolute error and weighted mean absolute percentage error are adopted to analyze the performance of the model. The results reveal that the forecasting method can provide a useful reference to decision-makers.