Forecasting with Predictive Analytics

Forecasting with predictive analytics offers the opportunity to leverage the huge amounts of data, now readily available, that exhibit the following characteristics:

+Data that changes over time, as well as static data
+Perhaps hundreds, thousands of independent variables
+Data reflective of today’s ever-changing economic environment

With data mining and machine learning methods, your data can easily and quickly be converted into knowledge to yield more accurate and more actionable models. We will demonstrate these techniques on a data set from a Brazilian grocery store chain. Information including date, store, promotions, climate, and unit price will be used to predict the total sales of oranges for the company. The model will help you identify what affects sales, decide on best prices and promos, and most importantly, forecast sales in the future.