Retail sales prediction and item recommendations using customer demographics at store level

This paper outlines a retail sales prediction and product recommendation system that was implemented for a chain of retail stores. The relative importance of consumer demographic characteristics for accurately modeling the sales of each customer type are derived and implemented in the model. Data consisted of daily sales information for 600 products at the store level, broken out over a set of non-overlapping customer types. A recommender system was built based on a fast online thin Singular Value Decomposition. It is shown that modeling data at a finer level of detail by clustering across customer types and demographics yields improved performance compared to a single aggregate model built for the entire dataset. Details of the system implementation are described and practical issues that arise in such real-world applications are discussed. Preliminary results from test stores over a one-year period indicate that the system resulted in significantly increased sales and improved efficiencies. A brief overview of how the primary methods discussed here were extended to a much larger data set is given to confirm and illustrate the scalability of this approach.