Demand forecasting is key to many industries such as airlines, retail, telecommunications, and healthcare. Inaccurate and imprecise demand forecasting leads to missed sales and customers, significantly impacting an organization's bottom line. One of the key challenges facing retailers is effectively managing inventory based on multiple internal and external factors. Inventory management is a complex business problem to solve—the demand for a product changes by location, weather, promotions, holidays, day of the week, special events, and other external factors, such as store demographics, consumer confidence, and unemployment.
In this chapter, we will look at how traditional techniques of time series forecasting such as ARIMA and exponential smoothing are different from neural network-based techniques. We will...
