A comparative study of univariate time-series methods for sales forecasting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Firms use time-series forecasting methods to predict sales. However, it is still a question which time-series method a forecaster is best, if only a single forecast is needed. This study investigates and evaluates different sales time-series forecasting methods: multiplicative Holt-Winters (HW), additive HW, seasonal auto regressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) [a variant of auto regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)], long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks and the Prophet method by Facebook on 32 univariate sales time-series. The data used to forecast sales is taken from Time Series Data Library (TSDL). With respect to the root mean square error (RMSE) evaluation metric, we find that forecasting sales with the SARIMA method offers the best performance, on average, relative to the other compared methods. To support the findings, both mathematical and economic drivers of the observed performance are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".