Machine Learning Outperforms Classical Forecasting on Horticultural Sales Predictions

Forecasting future demand is of high importance for many companies as it affects operational decisions. This is especially relevant for products with a short shelf life due to the potential disposal of unsold items. Horticultural products are highly influenced by this, however with limited attention in forecasting research so far. Beyond that, many forecasting competitions show a competitive performance of classical forecasting methods. For the first time, we empirically compared the performance of nine state-of-the-art machine learning and three classical forecasting algorithms for horticultural sales predictions. We show that machine learning methods were superior in all our experiments, with the gradient boosted ensemble learner XGBoost being the top performer in 14 out of 15 comparisons. This advantage over classical forecasting approaches increased for datasets with multiple seasons. Further, we show that including additional external factors, such as weather and holiday information, as well as meta-features led to a boost in predictive performance. In addition, we investigated whether the algorithms can capture the sudden increase in demand of horticultural products during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in 2020. For this special case, XGBoost was also superior. All code and data is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/grimmlab/HorticulturalSalesPredictions.