Novel Revenue Development and Forecasting Model using Machine Learning Approaches for Cosmetics Enterprises

Abstract:In the contemporary information society, constructing an effective sales prediction model is challenging due to the sizeable amount of purchasing information obtained from diverse consumer preferences. Many empirical cases shown in the existing literature argue that the traditional forecasting methods, such as the index of smoothness, moving average, and time series, have lost their dominance of prediction accuracy when they are compared with modern forecasting approaches such as neural network (NN) and support vector machine (SVM) models. To verify these findings, this paper utilizes the Taiwanese cosmetic sales data to examine three forecasting models: i) the back propagation neural network (BPNN), ii) least-square support vector machine (LSSVM), and iii) auto regressive model (AR). The result concludes that the LS-SVM has the smallest mean absolute percent error (MAPE) and largest Pearson correlation coefficient ( R2 ) between model and predicted values.