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Walmart Sales Forecasting Analysis

Walmart wants to accurately predict sales and demand to avoid stockouts. Sales data is available for 45 Walmart stores from 2010-2012, including weekly sales, temperature, fuel prices, economic indicators, and whether it was a holiday week. Key holidays like Super Bowl, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas significantly impact sales. The task is to analyze sales trends, identify best-selling and most variable stores, examine holiday and quarterly sales, and build a predictive model for one store's demand using linear regression and economic factors.

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306 views2 pages

Walmart Sales Forecasting Analysis

Walmart wants to accurately predict sales and demand to avoid stockouts. Sales data is available for 45 Walmart stores from 2010-2012, including weekly sales, temperature, fuel prices, economic indicators, and whether it was a holiday week. Key holidays like Super Bowl, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas significantly impact sales. The task is to analyze sales trends, identify best-selling and most variable stores, examine holiday and quarterly sales, and build a predictive model for one store's demand using linear regression and economic factors.

Uploaded by

kPrasad8
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Retail Analysis with Walmart Data

Project 4 
DESCRIPTION

One of the leading retail stores in the US, Walmart, would like to predict the sales and demand
accurately. There are certain events and holidays which impact sales on each day. There are sales
data available for 45 stores of Walmart. The business is facing a challenge due to unforeseen
demands and runs out of stock some times, due to the inappropriate machine learning algorithm.
An ideal ML algorithm will predict demand accurately and ingest factors like economic conditions
including CPI, Unemployment Index, etc.
Walmart runs several promotional markdown events throughout the year. These markdowns
precede prominent holidays, the four largest of all, which are the Super Bowl, Labour Day,
Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The weeks including these holidays are weighted five times higher in
the evaluation than non-holiday weeks. Part of the challenge presented by this competition is
modeling the effects of markdowns on these holiday weeks in the absence of complete/ideal
historical data. Historical sales data for 45 Walmart stores located in different regions are available.
Dataset Description
This is the historical data that covers sales from 2010-02-05 to 2012-11-01, in the file
Walmart_Store_sales. Within this file you will find the following fields:
 Store - the store number
 Date - the week of sales
 Weekly_Sales -  sales for the given store
 Holiday_Flag - whether the week is a special holiday week 1 – Holiday week 0 – Non-holiday
week
 Temperature - Temperature on the day of sale
 Fuel_Price - Cost of fuel in the region
 CPI – Prevailing consumer price index
 Unemployment - Prevailing unemployment rate
Holiday Events
Super Bowl: 12-Feb-10, 11-Feb-11, 10-Feb-12, 8-Feb-13
Labour Day: 10-Sep-10, 9-Sep-11, 7-Sep-12, 6-Sep-13
Thanksgiving: 26-Nov-10, 25-Nov-11, 23-Nov-12, 29-Nov-13
Christmas: 31-Dec-10, 30-Dec-11, 28-Dec-12, 27-Dec-13
Analysis Tasks
Basic Statistics tasks
 Which store has maximum sales
 Which store has maximum standard deviation i.e., the sales vary a lot. Also, find out the
coefficient of mean to standard deviation
 Which store/s has good quarterly growth rate in Q3’2012
 Some holidays have a negative impact on sales. Find out holidays which have higher sales
than the mean sales in non-holiday season for all stores together
 Provide a monthly and semester view of sales in units and give insights
Statistical Model
For Store 1 – Build  prediction models to forecast demand
 Linear Regression – Utilize variables like date and restructure dates as 1 for 5 Feb 2010
(starting from the earliest date in order). Hypothesize if CPI, unemployment, and fuel price
have any impact on sales.
 Change dates into days by creating new variable.
Select the model which gives best accuracy.

To download the datasets click here - 

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