A Novel Forecasting Model Based on Support Vector Regression and Bat Meta-Heuristic (Bat–SVR): Case Study in Printed Circuit Board Industry

Sales forecasting is very beneficial to most businesses. A successful business needs accurate sales forecasting to understand the market and sales trends. This paper presents a novel sales forecasting model by integrating support vector regression (SVR) and bat algorithm (BA). Since the accuracy of SVR forecasting mainly depends on SVR parameters, we use BA for tuning these parameters because Bat is a newly introduced algorithm and has many parameters. In order to find the best set of BA parameters Taguchi method was utilized. We validated our model on four known UCI datasets. Then we applied our model in printed circuit board (PCB) sales forecasting case study. We compared the accuracy of the proposed model with Genetic algorithm (GA)–SVR, particle swarm optimization (PSO)–SVR, and classic-SVR. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the others. To ensure the robustness of our proposed model, sensitivity analysis was also done using our model to find out the effects of dependent variables values on sales time series.