IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/annopr/v174y2010i1p33-4610.1007-s10479-008-0417-z.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Using clustering to improve sales forecasts in retail merchandising

Author

Listed:
  • Mahesh Kumar
  • Nitin Patel

Abstract

Given sales forecasts for a set of items along with the standard deviation associated with each forecast, we propose a new method of combining forecasts using the concepts of clustering. Clusters of items are identified based on the similarity in their sales forecasts and then a common forecast is computed for each cluster of items. On a real dataset from a national retail chain we have found that the proposed method of combining forecasts produces significantly better sales forecasts than either the individual forecasts (forecasts without combining) or an alternate method of using a single combined forecast for all items in a product line sold by this retailer. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Suggested Citation

  • Mahesh Kumar & Nitin Patel, 2010. "Using clustering to improve sales forecasts in retail merchandising," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 174(1), pages 33-46, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:174:y:2010:i:1:p:33-46:10.1007/s10479-008-0417-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s10479-008-0417-z
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10479-008-0417-z
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10479-008-0417-z?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bunn, Derek W. & Vassilopoulos, Angelos I., 1999. "Comparison of seasonal estimation methods in multi-item short-term forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 15(4), pages 431-443, October.
    2. Clemen, Robert T., 1989. "Combining forecasts: A review and annotated bibliography," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 559-583.
    3. de Menezes, Lilian M. & W. Bunn, Derek & Taylor, James W., 2000. "Review of guidelines for the use of combined forecasts," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 120(1), pages 190-204, January.
    4. Kumar, Mahesh & Patel, Nitin R., 2007. "Clustering data with measurement errors," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 51(12), pages 6084-6101, August.
    5. Fomby, Thomas B & Samanta, Subarna K, 1991. "Application of Stein Rules to Combination Forecasting," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 9(4), pages 391-407, October.
    6. Salvatore Terregrossa, 2005. "On the efficacy of constraints on the linear combination forecast model," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(1), pages 19-28.
    7. Glenn Milligan & Martha Cooper, 1985. "An examination of procedures for determining the number of clusters in a data set," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 50(2), pages 159-179, June.
    8. Marahaj, E.A. & Inder, B., 1999. "Forecasting Time Series from Clusters," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 9/99, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mehmet BARAN & Sýtký SÖNMEZER & Abdülvahid UÇAR, 2015. "Estimating Financial Trends by Cubic B-Spline Fitting via Fisher Algorithm," Turkish Economic Review, KSP Journals, vol. 2(1), pages 20-25, March.
    2. Rodrigo Lopez Farias & Vicenç Puig & Hector Rodriguez Rangel & Juan J. Flores, 2018. "Multi-Model Prediction for Demand Forecast in Water Distribution Networks," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(3), pages 1-21, March.
    3. Fildes, Robert & Ma, Shaohui & Kolassa, Stephan, 2022. "Retail forecasting: Research and practice," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 1283-1318.
    4. Rémy Garnier, 2022. "Concurrent neural network: a model of competition between times series," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 313(2), pages 945-964, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Armstrong, J. Scott & Green, Kesten C. & Graefe, Andreas, 2015. "Golden rule of forecasting: Be conservative," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 68(8), pages 1717-1731.
    2. Rendon-Sanchez, Juan F. & de Menezes, Lilian M., 2019. "Structural combination of seasonal exponential smoothing forecasts applied to load forecasting," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 275(3), pages 916-924.
    3. Patrick Afflerbach & Christopher Dun & Henner Gimpel & Dominik Parak & Johannes Seyfried, 2021. "A Simulation-Based Approach to Understanding the Wisdom of Crowds Phenomenon in Aggregating Expert Judgment," Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK, Springer;Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), vol. 63(4), pages 329-348, August.
    4. Avci, Ezgi & Ketter, Wolfgang & van Heck, Eric, 2018. "Managing electricity price modeling risk via ensemble forecasting: The case of Turkey," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 390-403.
    5. Yang, Dazhi & van der Meer, Dennis, 2021. "Post-processing in solar forecasting: Ten overarching thinking tools," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 140(C).
    6. Espasa, Antoni & Senra, Eva, 2017. "22 Years of inflation assessment and forecasting experience at the bulletin of EU & US inflation and macroeconomic analysis," DES - Working Papers. Statistics and Econometrics. WS 24678, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Estadística.
    7. Jakub Nowotarski & Rafał Weron, 2015. "Computing electricity spot price prediction intervals using quantile regression and forecast averaging," Computational Statistics, Springer, vol. 30(3), pages 791-803, September.
    8. Wilson, Kevin J., 2017. "An investigation of dependence in expert judgement studies with multiple experts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 325-336.
    9. Wang, Xiaoqian & Hyndman, Rob J. & Li, Feng & Kang, Yanfei, 2023. "Forecast combinations: An over 50-year review," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(4), pages 1518-1547.
    10. Andrawis, Robert R. & Atiya, Amir F. & El-Shishiny, Hisham, 2011. "Forecast combinations of computational intelligence and linear models for the NN5 time series forecasting competition," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(3), pages 672-688, July.
    11. Poncela, Pilar & Rodríguez, Julio & Sánchez-Mangas, Rocío & Senra, Eva, 2011. "Forecast combination through dimension reduction techniques," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 224-237, April.
    12. Goodwin, Paul, 2000. "Correct or combine? Mechanically integrating judgmental forecasts with statistical methods," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 261-275.
    13. Marta Poncela-Blanco & Pilar Poncela, 2021. "Improving Wind Power Forecasts: Combination through Multivariate Dimension Reduction Techniques," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(5), pages 1-16, March.
    14. Kang, Yanfei & Cao, Wei & Petropoulos, Fotios & Li, Feng, 2022. "Forecast with forecasts: Diversity matters," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 301(1), pages 180-190.
    15. Weron, Rafał, 2014. "Electricity price forecasting: A review of the state-of-the-art with a look into the future," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 1030-1081.
    16. Lessmann, Stefan & Sung, Ming-Chien & Johnson, Johnnie E.V. & Ma, Tiejun, 2012. "A new methodology for generating and combining statistical forecasting models to enhance competitive event prediction," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 218(1), pages 163-174.
    17. Seifert, Matthias & Hadida, Allègre L., 2013. "On the relative importance of linear model and human judge(s) in combined forecasting," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 120(1), pages 24-36.
    18. Bordignon, Silvano & Bunn, Derek W. & Lisi, Francesco & Nan, Fany, 2013. "Combining day-ahead forecasts for British electricity prices," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 88-103.
    19. João F. Caldeira & Guilherme V. Moura & Francisco J. Nogales & André A. P. Santos, 2017. "Combining Multivariate Volatility Forecasts: An Economic-Based Approach," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 15(2), pages 247-285.
    20. Theodosiou, Marina, 2011. "Forecasting monthly and quarterly time series using STL decomposition," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 1178-1195, October.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:174:y:2010:i:1:p:33-46:10.1007/s10479-008-0417-z. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.