Clothing Sale Forecasting by a Composite GRU–Prophet Model With an Attention Mechanism

Smart manufacturing, which is increasingly popular worldwide, is aided by time-series forecasting. As the volume of historical data increases, powerful forecasting techniques that reveal unknown relationships between past and future values are required to provide accurate forecasts of production and sales. Thus, in this article, a composite gate recurrent unit (GRU)-Prophet model with an attention mechanism was constructed to predict sales volume. In this composite model, Prophet model and GRU model with attention mechanism were used to capture linear and nonlinear features, respectively. The composite model was experimentally determined to be more applicable and to provide more accurate predictions than did recurrent neural network, long short-term memory, gate recurrent unit, Prophet, and autoregressive integrated moving average models. This article's composite model is suited to rapid changes in market demand and helps enterprises be more competitive in the field of smart manufacturing.