Innovative Out-of-Stock Prediction System Based on Data History Knowledge Deep Learning Processing

Abstract

Research and development efforts in the field of commercial applications have invested strategic interest in the design of intelligent systems that correctly handle out-of-stock events. An out-of-stock event refers to a scenario in which such customers do not have the availability of the products they want to buy. This scenario generates important economic damage to the producer and to the commercial store. Addressing the out-of-stock problem is currently of great interest in the commercial field as it would allow limiting the economic damages deriving from these events. Furthermore, in the era of online commerce (e-commerce), it would significantly limit out-of-stock events which show a considerable economic impact in the field. For these reasons, the authors proposed a solution based on deep learning for predicting the residual stock amount of a commercial product based on the intelligent analysis of specific visual–commercial data as well as seasonality. By means of a combined deep pipeline embedding convolutional architecture boosted with a self-attention mechanism and a downstream temporal convolutional network, the authors will be able to predict the remaining stock of a particular commodity. By integrating and interpreting climate/seasonal information, customers’ behavior data, and full history data on the dynamics of commercial sales, it will be possible to estimate the residual stock of a certain product and, therefore, define purchase orders efficiently. An accurate prediction of remaining stocks allows an efficient trade order policy which results in a significant reduction in out-of-stock events. The experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach with an accuracy (in the prediction of the remaining stock of such products) greater than 90%.