Applied Data Mining for Forecasting Using SAS

Chapter 12: An Example of Data Mining for Forecasting

12.1 The Business Problem

12.2 The Charter

12.3 The Mind Map

12.4 Data Sources

12.5 Data Prep

12.6 Exploratory Analysis and Data Preprocessing

12.7 X Variable Imputation

12.8 Variable Reduction and Selection

12.9 Modeling

12.10 Summary

12.1 The Business Problem

For many companies, in order to manage resources ranging from people to brick-and-mortar assets, it is important to have a sales or demand forecast. Many large corporations use a weekly, monthly, or quarterly process called Executive Sales and Operations Planning (ES&OP) (Wallace 2004). A key component to this process is a good forecast. Even though a corporation can buy marketing research reports that indicate where a market is going, ...