Research Area:  Machine Learning
In the increasingly competitive fashion retail industry, companies are constantly adopting strategies focused on adjusting the products characteristics to closely satisfy customers requirements and preferences. Although the lifecycles of fashion products are very short, the definition of inventory and purchasing strategies can be supported by the large amounts of historical data which are collected and stored in companies databases. This study explores the use of a deep learning approach to forecast sales in fashion industry, predicting the sales of new individual products in future seasons. This study aims to support a fashion retail company in its purchasing operations and consequently the dataset under analysis is a real dataset provided by this company. The models were developed considering a wide and diverse set of variables, namely products physical characteristics and the opinion of domain experts. Furthermore, this study compares the sales predictions obtained with the deep learning approach with those obtained with a set of shallow techniques, i.e. Decision Trees, Random Forest, Support Vector Regression, Artificial Neural Networks and Linear Regression. The model employing deep learning was found to have good performance to predict sales in fashion retail market, however for part of the evaluation metrics considered, it does not perform significantly better than some of the shallow techniques, namely Random Forest.
Keywords:  
Deep Neural Networks
Sales Forecasting
Fashion Retail
Machine Learning
Deep Learning
Author(s) Name:  A.L.D.Loureiro,V.L.MiguĂ©is and Lucas F.M.da Silva
Journal name:  Decision Support Systems
Conferrence name:  
Publisher name:  ELSEVIER
DOI:  10.1016/j.dss.2018.08.010
Volume Information:  Volume 114, October 2018, Pages 81-93
Paper Link:   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167923618301398