It was our PURDUE -Dta Science with R project
About Dataset Historical sales data for 45 Walmart stores located in different regions are available. There are certain events and holidays which impact sales on each day. The business is facing a challenge due to unforeseen demands and runs out of stock some times, due to inappropriate machine learning algorithm. Walmart would like to predict the sales and demand accurately. An ideal ML algorithm will predict demand accurately and ingest factors like economic conditions including CPI, Unemployment Index, etc. The objective is to determine the factors affecting the sales and to analyze the impact of markdowns around holidays on the sales.
Holiday Events Super Bowl: 12-Feb-10, 11-Feb-11, 10-Feb-12, 8-Feb-13 Labour Day: 10-Sep-10, 9-Sep-11, 7-Sep-12, 6-Sep-13 Thanksgiving: 26-Nov-10, 25-Nov-11, 23-Nov-12, 29-Nov-13 Christmas: 31-Dec-10, 30-Dec-11, 28-Dec-12, 27-Dec-13
Analysis Tasks
Basic Statistics tasks
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Which store has maximum sales
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Which store has maximum standard deviation i.e., the sales vary a lot. Also, find out the coefficient of mean to standard deviation
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Which store/s has good quarterly growth rate in Q3’2012
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Some holidays have a negative impact on sales. Find out holidays which have higher sales than the mean sales in non-holiday season for all stores together
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Provide a monthly and semester view of sales in units and give insights
Statistical Model For Store 1 – Build prediction models to forecast demand (Linear Regression – Utilize variables like date and restructure dates as 1 for 5 Feb 2010 (starting from the earliest date in order). Hypothesize if CPI, unemployment, and fuel price have any impact on sales.) Change dates into days by creating new variable. Select the model which gives best accuracy.