Create holiday / promotional effect variables

We saw some notion of seasonality in the previous exercise, but let's test to make sure that something actually is there. Your bosses think that their products would be more desired around the weeks of Christmas, New Year's, and Valentine's Day. The marketing department also mentions that they have been running promotional deals the week before Mother's Day the previous 5 years. Let's create a binary indicator variable for New Year's!

This exercise is part of the course

Forecasting Product Demand in R

Exercise instructions

Create a date index for the weeks of New Year's in your training data set called n.dates.
Build an xts object called newyear using the date index n.dates.
Create a sequence of 154 dates from Jan. 19, 2014 (your training data time frame) called dates_train.
Merge the newyear object with the training dates from the last bullet and fill all the missing values with 0's.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Create date indices for New Year's week
n.dates <- as.Date(c("2014-12-28", "2015-12-27", "2016-12-25"))

# Create xts objects for New Year's
newyear <- as.xts(rep(1, 3), order.by = ___)

# Create sequence of 154 weeks for merging
dates_train <- seq(as.Date("2014-01-19"), length = ___, by = ___)

# Merge training dates into New Year's object
newyear <- ___(newyear, ___, fill = ___)

Edit and Run Code

This exercise is part of the course

Forecasting Product Demand in R

IntermediateSkill Level

4.9+

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When it comes to forecasting, time series modeling is a great place to start! You need to forecast out the future values of sales demand and a good baseline approach would be ARIMA models. In this chapter you'll learn how to quickly implement ARIMA models and get good initial forecasts for future product demand.

Exercise 1: Loading data into xts object Exercise 2: Importing data Exercise 3: Plotting / visualizing data Exercise 4: ARIMA Time Series 101 Exercise 5: auto.arima() function Exercise 6: Interpret auto.arima Exercise 7: Forecasting and Evaluating Exercise 8: Forecast function Exercise 9: Calculating MAPE and MAE Exercise 10: Visualizing Forecast Exercise 11: Confidence Intervals for Forecast

Economic theory has a lot to say about predicting values of demand. Obviously, external factors like price, seasonality, and timing of promotions will drive some aspects of product demand. In this chapter you'll learn about the basics around price elasticity models and how to incorporate seasonality and promotion timing factors into our product demand forecasts.

Exercise 1: Price elasticity Exercise 2: Calculating price elasticity Exercise 3: Interpret results from elasticity Exercise 4: Seasonal / holiday / promotional effects Exercise 5: Visualize holiday / promotion effects Exercise 6: Create holiday / promotional effect variables

Current Exercise

Exercise 7: Regression for holiday / promotional effects Exercise 8: Significant holiday or promotional effects?Exercise 9: Forecasting with regression Exercise 10: Create future predictor variables Exercise 11: Forecast future values of demand Exercise 12: Visualizing forecasts of regression

Time series models and pricing regressions don't have to be thought of as separate approaches to product demand forecasting. They can be combined! In this chapter you'll learn about two ways of "combining" the information gained in both modeling approaches - transfer functions and forecast ensembling.

Exercise 1: Residuals from regression model Exercise 2: Calculating residuals from regression Exercise 3: Visualizing residuals Exercise 4: Forecasting residuals Exercise 5: auto.arima function Exercise 6: Forecasting residuals with time series Exercise 7: Visualizing residual forecasts Exercise 8: Transfer functions & ensembling Exercise 9: Combining residuals from regression & time series Exercise 10: Visualizing transfer function forecast Exercise 11: Calculating transfer function MAPE and MAE Exercise 12: ARIMA Forecasting Exercise 13: Ensembling of Forecasts

Everything up until this point deals with making individual models for forecasting product demand. However, we haven't taken advantage of the fact that all of these products form a product hierarchy of sales. Products make up regions and regions make up states. How can we ensure that our forecasts reconcile correctly up and down the hierarchy? In this chapter you'll learn about hierarchical forecasting and how to use it to your advantage in forecasting product demand.

Exercise 1: Bottom-Up Hierarchical Forecasting Exercise 2: Build time series forecast for new product Exercise 3: Build regression forecast for new product Exercise 4: Ensemble forecast for new product Exercise 5: Calculate bottom-up forecast for whole region Exercise 6: Top-Down Hierarchical Forecasting Exercise 7: Build time series forecast at regional level Exercise 8: Using average historical proportions Exercise 9: Using proportion of historical averages Exercise 10: Middle-Out Hierarchical Forecasting Exercise 11: Build time series forecast for new region Exercise 12: Top-down forecast for new region Exercise 13: Bottom-up forecast for whole state Exercise 14: Congratulations!