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January 01, 2022

Research Paper Reads - Forecasting

Paper #1 - Product age based demand forecast model for fashion retail

Key Notes

  • 300 stores, 35k items and around 40 categories.
  • Accurate demand forecast 6-12 months in advance
  • Age-based prediction model
  • Time series models are based on forecasts obtained from previous year’s sales of similar items
  • Clustering, classification and prediction
  • Determine the appropriate cluster for a new fashion item
  • Attributes such as Sleeve length, Color, Pattern, Fastening type and Neck shape
  • color and sleeve length are some of the crucial attributes for demand forecasting
  • The average selling price at which people buy Dresses is 25$ and is 36$ for Kids wear


Paper #2 - Demand Forecasting in the Presence of Systematic Events: Cases in Capturing Sales Promotions

Key Notes

  • Demand uplift by analyzing historical sales data and different combinations of promotions
  • Promotion frequency and magnitude of demand uplift
  • Promotions, holidays and special events
  • contextual information include: changes in promotional plans, competitor activities, market intelligence, sudden climate changes and dynamic influencers
  • Type of promotion (e.g., single-buy, buy one get one free, multi-buy)
  • Advertisement type (e.g., in-store, online, catalogue)
  • Baseline + Uplift and Predicted value
  • Major and minor promotions are advertised in retailers’ weekly catalogues and are typically associated with discounts of approximately 50% and 30% off regular price, respectively
  • Single buy, Multiple buy transactions per week

Paper #3 - Elasticity Based Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization for Online Retail

Key Notes

  • Price elasticity demand value
  • Relative change of demand and retail price in percentage, Compute it and add it



  • Data Pre-processing module integrates data aggregation, missing data processing, data transformation, data
  • normalization and outlier detection, Additional binary features: is_holiday and is_weekend, is_festiveweekednd, is_festiveweekday

  • Optimal pricing formulation

Forecasting: theory and practice

Notes from Supply chain section

  • Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning
  • A supply chain is ‘a network of stakeholders (e.g., retailers, manufacturers, suppliers) who collaborate to satisfy customer demand’
  • Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)
  • The ‘bullwhip effect’ occurs whenever there is amplification of demand variability through the supply chain (Lee et al., 2004), leading to excess inventories
  • Zero sales due to stock-outs or low demand occur very often at the SKU × store level, both at weekly and daily granularity
  • Product level (PL) information consists of the time series of sales and returns, alongside
  • information on the time each product spends with a customer
  • Average custom spend per month
  • Average sales per month per brand per category
  • Unsold inventory count
More Reads

Keep Exploring!!!

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