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How Many Will This Machine Sell Today?

Given the day, the weather, holidays, the temperature and whether the product was in stock, how many will sell from this machine? Restocking to the forecast avoids empty slots and wasted trips.

Use caseCustomersPredictionModel evaluation

The table

Daily product sales from machines with calendar, weather, holiday, temperature and availability columns. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Sales Dataset, 10,738 rows by 15 columns, licensed CC0. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.69. At 10,738 rows and 14 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 8,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.

Walkthrough

  1. Load it from the catalogue

    Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.

    import pandas as pd
    from welt import Client
    
    with Client() as client:
        item = client.research_datasets(q="sales dataset machine weather holiday", limit=1)["items"][0]
        info = client.research_dataset(item["id"])
        data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"])
    
    target = info["targets"][0]
    target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target
    print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)
  2. Pick the rows

    Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 8,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.

    known = data.dropna(subset=[target])
    new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1)
    table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(8000, random_state=7)
  3. Compare the models and predict

    The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. RMSE and MAE are average errors in the target's own units, so lower is better. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.

    with Client() as client:
        evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="regression", seed=7,
                                     models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"])
        model = evaluation.fit()
    
    print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "rmse_mean", "mae_mean"]])
    features = new_rows.drop(columns=target)
    print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features)}))

What you get

A sales estimatePer product and day.
Smarter restockingFill the machines that will run out first.
A clear signalThe catalogue measures a good signal.

Try it

Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "sales dataset machine weather holiday", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".