Sales Forecasting for Small Medium Enterprises Using Machine Learning

Yadav, Shailesh Subhashchand (2023) Sales Forecasting for Small Medium Enterprises Using Machine Learning. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

Sales prediction is a critical aspect of business operations, enabling Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for making informed decisions, reducing risks, and capitalizing on opportunities in a fast-paced corporate environment. Traditional methods often lack accuracy and fail to account for the desired results using the sales data. This paper consists of two different datasets coming from different business domain which are our small enterprise data comes from superstore business domain whereas our medium enterprises comes from a pharma industry. It also presents a comprehensive approach to sales prediction for SMEs using machine learning techniques. It also showcases that machine learning algorithms are better at predicting the future sales when compared to traditional forecasting methods. Furthermore, the study investigates the impact of external factors on forecast accuracy, such as seasonal trends, marketing campaigns and location. Integrating these aspects improves model performance, allowing SMEs to handle market swings more effectively. Comparing multiple machine learning algorithms for small enterprises random forest gives best results with r2 score of 0. 61% while XGBoost came out to be the best performer with r2 score of 0.98 for medium enterprises.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Muslim Jameel, Syed UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > Q Science (General) > Self-organizing systems. Conscious automata > Machine learning H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > Small Business Sector
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Data Analytics
Depositing User:	Tamara Malone
Date Deposited:	09 Jan 2025 15:32
Last Modified:	09 Jan 2025 15:32
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/7291

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