The diploma thesis talks about the differences between Gradient boosting with regression trees (GBRT) and Uber neural networks in sales forecasting.
Sales forecasting is important because of the ever-increasing number of products and limited space in warehouses. There is a long history of sales forecasts, which is divided into several periods. The latest among them is the period of forecasting through machine learning, which also includes the methods discussed methods.
The methods were tested on data from a competition on Kaggle, where the goal of the competition was to predict sales for 10 Wallmart stores for a period of 28 days. In general, the more a successful method was GBRT method, which overall predicted better than Uber’s LSTM architecture (ULSTM). ULSTM performed better in shorter time periods and in one, despite the general dominance of the GBRT method, predicted better.
For larger sets of attributes, the GBRT method proved to be much faster than ULSTM and there was also a large difference between the impact of random seed on the results, which proved to be a major problem with ULSTM. Test results showed that there are many reasons why Gradient boosting is much more used in forecasting time series such as LSTM.
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