A Comprehensive Forecasting Framework based on Multi-Stage Hierarchical Forecasting Reconciliation and Adjustment

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yang, Zhengchao, Ghosh, Mithun, Saha, Anish, Xu, Dong, Shmakov, Konstantin, Lee, Kuang-chih
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Yang, Zhengchao
Ghosh, Mithun
Saha, Anish
Xu, Dong
Shmakov, Konstantin
Lee, Kuang-chih
author_facet Yang, Zhengchao
Ghosh, Mithun
Saha, Anish
Xu, Dong
Shmakov, Konstantin
Lee, Kuang-chih
contents Ads demand forecasting for Walmart's ad products plays a critical role in enabling effective resource planning, allocation, and management of ads performance. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive demand forecasting system that tackles hierarchical time series forecasting in business settings. Though traditional hierarchical reconciliation methods ensure forecasting coherence, they often trade off accuracy for coherence especially at lower levels and fail to capture the seasonality unique to each time-series in the hierarchy. Thus, we propose a novel framework "Multi-Stage Hierarchical Forecasting Reconciliation and Adjustment (Multi-Stage HiFoReAd)" to address the challenges of preserving seasonality, ensuring coherence, and improving accuracy. Our system first utilizes diverse models, ensembled through Bayesian Optimization (BO), achieving base forecasts. The generated base forecasts are then passed into the Multi-Stage HiFoReAd framework. The initial stage refines the hierarchy using Top-Down forecasts and "harmonic alignment." The second stage aligns the higher levels' forecasts using MinTrace algorithm, following which the last two levels undergo "harmonic alignment" and "stratified scaling", to eventually achieve accurate and coherent forecasts across the whole hierarchy. Our experiments on Walmart's internal Ads-demand dataset and 3 other public datasets, each with 4 hierarchical levels, demonstrate that the average Absolute Percentage Error from the cross-validation sets improve from 3% to 40% across levels against BO-ensemble of models (LGBM, MSTL+ETS, Prophet) as well as from 1.2% to 92.9% against State-Of-The-Art models. In addition, the forecasts at all hierarchical levels are proved to be coherent. The proposed framework has been deployed and leveraged by Walmart's ads, sales and operations teams to track future demands, make informed decisions and plan resources.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_14718
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Comprehensive Forecasting Framework based on Multi-Stage Hierarchical Forecasting Reconciliation and Adjustment
Yang, Zhengchao
Ghosh, Mithun
Saha, Anish
Xu, Dong
Shmakov, Konstantin
Lee, Kuang-chih
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Ads demand forecasting for Walmart's ad products plays a critical role in enabling effective resource planning, allocation, and management of ads performance. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive demand forecasting system that tackles hierarchical time series forecasting in business settings. Though traditional hierarchical reconciliation methods ensure forecasting coherence, they often trade off accuracy for coherence especially at lower levels and fail to capture the seasonality unique to each time-series in the hierarchy. Thus, we propose a novel framework "Multi-Stage Hierarchical Forecasting Reconciliation and Adjustment (Multi-Stage HiFoReAd)" to address the challenges of preserving seasonality, ensuring coherence, and improving accuracy. Our system first utilizes diverse models, ensembled through Bayesian Optimization (BO), achieving base forecasts. The generated base forecasts are then passed into the Multi-Stage HiFoReAd framework. The initial stage refines the hierarchy using Top-Down forecasts and "harmonic alignment." The second stage aligns the higher levels' forecasts using MinTrace algorithm, following which the last two levels undergo "harmonic alignment" and "stratified scaling", to eventually achieve accurate and coherent forecasts across the whole hierarchy. Our experiments on Walmart's internal Ads-demand dataset and 3 other public datasets, each with 4 hierarchical levels, demonstrate that the average Absolute Percentage Error from the cross-validation sets improve from 3% to 40% across levels against BO-ensemble of models (LGBM, MSTL+ETS, Prophet) as well as from 1.2% to 92.9% against State-Of-The-Art models. In addition, the forecasts at all hierarchical levels are proved to be coherent. The proposed framework has been deployed and leveraged by Walmart's ads, sales and operations teams to track future demands, make informed decisions and plan resources.
title A Comprehensive Forecasting Framework based on Multi-Stage Hierarchical Forecasting Reconciliation and Adjustment
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14718