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Fast Forecasting of Unstable Data Streams for On-Demand Service Platforms

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  • Yu Jeffrey Hu
  • Jeroen Rombouts
  • Ines Wilms

Abstract

On-demand service platforms face a challenging problem of forecasting a large collection of high-frequency regional demand data streams that exhibit instabilities. This paper develops a novel forecast framework that is fast and scalable, and automatically assesses changing environments without human intervention. We empirically test our framework on a large-scale demand data set from a leading on-demand delivery platform in Europe, and find strong performance gains from using our framework against several industry benchmarks, across all geographical regions, loss functions, and both pre- and post-Covid periods. We translate forecast gains to economic impacts for this on-demand service platform by computing financial gains and reductions in computing costs.

Suggested Citation

  • Yu Jeffrey Hu & Jeroen Rombouts & Ines Wilms, 2023. "Fast Forecasting of Unstable Data Streams for On-Demand Service Platforms," Papers 2303.01887, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2303.01887
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