Forecasting Sales with Time Series, LightGBM & Random Forest

Welcome to Forecasting Sales with Time Series, LightGBM & Random Forest course. This is a comprehensive project based course where you will learn step by step on how to build sales forecasting models. This course is a perfect combination between machine learning and sales analytics, making it an ideal opportunity to enhance your data science skills. This course will be mainly concentrating on three major aspects, the first one is data analysis where you will explore the sales report dataset from multiple angles, the second one is to conduct customer segmentation analysis, and the third one is to build sales forecasting models using time series, LightGBM, Random Forest, LSTM, and SARIMA (Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average). In the introduction session, you will learn the basic fundamentals of sales forecasting, such as getting to know forecasting models that will be used and also learn how sales forecasting can help us to identify consumer behavior. Then, in the next session, we are going to learn about the full step by step process on how time series forecasting works. This section will cover data collection, preprocessing, splitting the data into training and testing sets, selecting model, training model, and forecasting. Afterward, you will also learn about several factors that contribute to sales performance, for example, product quality, marketing strategies, seasonal trends, market saturation, supply chain efficiency, and macro economic factors. Once you have learnt all necessary knowledge about the sales forecasting model, we will start the project. Firstly you will be guided step by step on how to set up Google Colab IDE. In addition to that, you will also learn to find and download sales report dataset from Kaggle, Once, everything is ready, we will enter the main section of the course which is the project section The project will be consisted of three main parts, the first part is the data analysis and visualization where you will explore the dataset from various angles, in the second part, you will learn step by step on how to conduct extensive customer segmentation analysis, meanwhile, in the third part, you will learn how to forecast sales using time series, LightGBM, Random Forest, LSTM, and Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average. At the end of the course, you will also evaluate the sales forecasting model’s accuracy and performance using Mean Absolute Error and residual analysis.

First of all, before getting into the course, we need to ask ourselves this question: why should we learn to forecast sales? Well, here is my answer, Forecasting sales is a strategic imperative for businesses in today's dynamic market. By mastering the art of sales forecasting, we gain the power to anticipate market trends, understand consumer behavior, and optimize resource allocation. It's not just about predicting numbers, it's about staying ahead of the competition, adapting to changing demands, and making informed decisions that drive business success. In addition to that, by building this sales forecasting project, you will level up your data science and machine learning skills. Last but not least, even though forecasting sales can be very useful, however, you still need to be aware that no matter how advanced your forecasting model is, there is no such thing as 100% accuracy when it comes to forecasting.

Below are things that you can expect to learn from this course:

• Learn the basic fundamentals of sales forecasting

• Learn how time series forecasting models work. This section will cover data collection, data exploration, preprocessing, train test split, model selection, model training, and forecasting

• Learn about factors that can contribute to sales performance, such as seasonal trends, market saturation and supply chain efficiency

• Learn how to find and download datasets from Kaggle

• Learn how to clean dataset by removing missing rows and duplicate values

• Learn how to conduct customer segmentation analysis

• Learn how to analyze order fulfillment efficiency

• Learn how to analyze sales performance trend

• Learn how to build sales forecasting model using ARIMA, SARIMA, LightGBM, Random Forest, and LSTM

• Learn how to evaluate forecasting model’s accuracy and performance by calculating mean absolute error and conduct residual analysis

Additional Projects

Learning about KPIs in Sales: In this project, you'll dive into crucial sales KPIs such as conversion rate, sales growth, churn rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and customer acquisition cost. These KPIs provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of sales strategies and help businesses optimize their performance.

Forecast Sales Using XGBoost: This project will guide you through forecasting sales using XGBoost, a powerful machine learning algorithm. You’ll learn how to use historical data to make accurate predictions about future sales, enabling businesses to plan more effectively.

Forecast Sales Using GRU: In this project, you’ll explore forecasting sales with GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit), a type of neural network that works well with time series data. By applying GRU, you’ll be able to generate accurate sales forecasts that account for trends and patterns over time.