EX.4.

1 Wal-Mart Sales Forecasting using weekly sales data

1. Introduction:

In today's dynamic retail landscape, accurate sales forecasting is paramount for businesses to
optimize inventory management, staffing, and strategic decision-making. Among retail giants,
Walmart stands as a cornerstone, continually seeking innovative approaches to enhance operational
efficiency and customer satisfaction. This introduction lays the foundation for understanding the
significance and challenges of predicting sales within the expansive ecosystem of Walmart.

2. Objectives:

This experiment encompass a multifaceted approach aimed at optimizing operational efficiency,

enhancing customer experience, and driving revenue growth within the retail giant's expansive
ecosystem. By improving forecast accuracy, the project seeks to minimize errors and allocate
resources effectively across diverse product categories and store locations. Through optimized
inventory management, the objective is to streamline operations, reduce stock-outs, and enhance
inventory turnover rates.

3. Data Collection:

We’ll collect the sales data from Kaggle, including relevant features, to train a random forest
regressor model for accurate predictive classification.

4. Data Cleaning and Preprocessing:

 Handling Missing Values: Identify and handle missing values in the dataset appropriately. This
could involve imputation techniques such as mean, median, or mode imputation, or more advanced
methods like predictive modeling or interpolation based on surrounding data points.

 Removing Duplicates: Check for and remove any duplicate entries in the dataset to ensure data
integrity and prevent skewing of results.

 Dealing with Outliers: Identify outliers in the data and decide whether to remove them or
transform them to minimize their impact on the predictive model. Techniques such as log
transformation can be used to handle outliers effectively.
 Normalization/Standardization: Normalize or standardize numerical features to ensure that they
are on a similar scale. This helps prevent certain features from dominating the model due to their
larger magnitude.

5. Exploratory Data Analysis(EDA):

Through comprehensive EDA, stakeholders can uncover vital insights guiding the development of
accurate predictive models for Walmart Sales Prediction, enhancing decision-making and
operational efficiency within the retail giant's ecosystem.

6. Model Training:

In training the Random Forest regression model for Walmart Sales Prediction, several key steps
were undertaken to ensure its effectiveness and reliability. Initially, the dataset was divided into
training and testing sets to evaluate the model's performance accurately. Hyperparameters were
optimized through techniques such as grid search or randomized search, enhancing the model's
predictive capability. Feature importance analysis was conducted to identify the most influential
variables in predicting sales, guiding feature selection and model refinement. Cross-validation was
employed to assess the model's robustness and generalizability across different subsets of data.

7. Model Evaluation:

These include calculating metrics such as Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error
(MSE), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) to quantify the model's accuracy in predicting sales
values. Additionally, the R-squared (R^2) score provides insight into the proportion of variance in
sales explained by the model, with higher values indicating better fit. Residual analysis is crucial to
ensure that the differences between predicted and actual sales values are normally distributed with a
mean close to zero, indicating unbiased predictions.

8. Conclusion:

In conclusion, predicting Walmart sales is a complex but vital process that involves analyzing data,
training models, and evaluating their performance. By using techniques like Random Forest
regression, we can make accurate forecasts, which help optimize inventory, improve operations,
and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.
CODE OF THE PROJECT:

Step1: Import dependencies

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from sklearn.metrics import r2_score

from sklearn.preprocessing import MinMaxScaler

from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressorfrom

sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
Step2: Read the dataset

df=pd.read_csv("/kaggle/input/walmart-sales/Walmart_sales.csv") df.head()

Step3: Data Preprocessing

#displaying the attributes before converting

df.info()

#the date value is given as string so we are converting it as datetime

df["Date"] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'], format='mixed', dayfirst=True)

#displaying the attributes after converting

df.info()
#Sorts the DataFrame 'df' by the 'Date' column
df = df.sort_values(by="Date")
#Groups the sorted DataFrame by the 'Date' column and Calculates the meanfor each
group.

grdate = df.groupby(by=["Date"]).mean()
#viewing the dataframe after grouping

grdate.head()

# Sets the plot style to mimic the FiveThirtyEight style.

plt.style.use("fivethirtyeight")
# Specifies the size of the figure to be created

plt.figure(figsize=(18,6))
# Plots the mean weekly sales data.

plt.plot(grdate.index,grdate['Weekly_Sales'])
#Filter the DataFrame to select rows where the value in the 'Weekly_Sales' column is greater
than 1,200,000 and the unique dates from the filtered rows

df[df['Weekly_Sales']>1200000]['Date'].unique()

# Define a boolean condition for dates in November after the 15th

f1 = (df['Date'].dt.month == 11) & (df['Date'].dt.day>15)

# Define a boolean condition for dates in December

f2 = df['Date'].dt.month == 12
#separating predictor variables and target variables
x=df.drop(columns = ["Weekly_Sales","Date"] y =

df['Weekly_Sales']

Step4: Model Building

#defining the model RandomForest Regressor

rf= RandomForestRegressor()

model=rf.fit(x,y)

#checking the accuracy of the model

model.score(x,y)