Prediction of psychiatric drugs sale during COVID-19

Abstract

In the pharmaceutical industry, the production of psychiatric drugs has been seriously disrupted since the appearance of COVID'19. For that, Demand Forecasting of psychiatric drugs is among the big challenges in this industry. The objective is to avoid an excess of stock and, at the same time, to ensure that a stock rupture does not occur. Based on analysis of psychiatric drugs data, we compare in this paper several forecasting techniques which are Exponential Smoothing, seasonal ARIMA (i.e. SARIMA), SARIMAX, enhanced with the integration of exogenous (explanatory) variables, and LSTM. Through all the done tests, we make a comparison study of the results to identify the most promising models.