Forecast retail sales and food services in United States

Abstract

Retail industry is going through major changes. Technology has been disrupting the retail market. In addition, the usage of online channels is significantly increasing in the retail market. United States is the primary ground for many of these activities. This project intends to study the key parameters and categories affecting Total US Retail sales and food services based on data available from 1992 and develops models that can predict the total U.S Retail sales and food services for future. The predicted values from 2015 Jan till 2015 Dec are detailed with this report. The project results help ? Retail market researchers who study market trends and market growth opportunities in the U.S market. ? Retailers to quantify the market growth opportunities and appropriately plan financial budget ? Data Scientists who want to develop forecasting models to forecast retail sales in other markets/countries. Potentially, they will face similar challenges that I faced and could apply some of the learnings from this report. For the study, time series forecasting methods, multi-variate regression methods were applied. Since some of the independent observations are correlated with each other, methods to explore the relations between the independent variables and reduce them to smaller number of dimensions were also explored in the course of the study.