A comparative study of univariate time-series methods for sales forecasting
Why this work is in the frame
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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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it