The Development of a Hybrid Error Feedback Model for Sales Forecasting

Sales forecasting is one of the significant issues in the industrial and service sector which can lead to facilitated management decisions and reduce the lost values in case of being dealt with properly. Also sales forecasting is one of the complicated problems in analyzing time series and data mining due to the number of intervening parameters. Various models were presented on this issue and each one found acceptable results. However, developing the methods in this study is still considered by researchers. In this regard, the present study provided a hybrid model with error feedback for sales forecasting. In this study, forecasting was conducted using a supervised learning method. Then, the remaining values (model error) were specified and the error values were forecasted using another learning method. Finally, two trained models were combined together and consecutively used for sales forecasting. In other words, first the forecasting was conducted and then the error rate was determined by the second model. The total forecasting and model error indicated the final forecasting. The computational results obtained from numerical experiments indicated the superiority of the proposed hybrid method performance over the common models in the available literature and reduced the indicators related to forecasting error.