Retail sales forecasting with meta-learning

Retail sales forecasting often requires forecasts for thousands of products for many stores. We present a meta-learning framework based on newly developed deep convolutional neural networks, which can first learn a feature representation from raw sales time series data automatically, and then link the learnt features with a set of weights which are used to combine a pool of base-forecasting methods. The experiments which are based on IRI weekly data show that the proposed meta-learner provides superior forecasting performance compared with a number of state-of-art benchmarks, though the accuracy gains over some more sophisticated meta ensemble benchmarks are modest and the learnt features lack interpretability. When designing a meta-learner in forecasting retail sales, we recommend building a pool of base-forecasters including both individual and pooled forecasting methods, and target finding the best combination forecasts instead of the best individual method.