Evaluation of Machine Learning Methods for Time Series Forecasting on E-commerce Data

Abstract: Within demand forecasting, and specifically within the field of e-commerce, the provided data often contains erratic behaviours which are difficult to explain. This induces contradictions to the common assumptions within classical approaches for time series analysis. Yet, classical and naive approaches are still commonly used. Machine learning could be used to alleviate such problems. This thesis evaluates four models together with Swedish fin-tech company QLIRO AB. More specifically, a MLR (Multiple Linear Regression) model, a classic Box-Jenkins model (SARIMAX), an XGBoost model, and a LSTM-network (Long Short-Term Memory). The provided data consists of aggregated total daily reservations by e-merchants within the Nordic market from 2014. Some data pre processing was required and a smoothed version of the data set was created for comparison. Each model was constructed according to their specific requirements but with similar feature engineering. Evaluation was then made on a monthly level with a forecast horizon of 30 days during 2021. The results shows that both the MLR and the XGBoost provides the most consistent results together with perks for being easy to use. After these two, the LSTM-network showed the best results for November and December on the original data set but worst overall. Yet it had good performance on the smoothed data set and was then comparable to the first two. The SARIMAX was the worst performing of all the models considered in this thesis and was not as easy to implement.