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 Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7387–7393

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Expert Systems with Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

A sales forecasting model for new-released and nonlinear sales trend products
Kenji Tanaka *
Department of Systems Innovations, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: This paper proposes a sales forecasting model for new-released products with a knowledge-based data-
Sales forecasting base. Though forecasting future demand is an essential part of business planning and operation, most
New-released products major forecasting methods are applied only to regular consuming items, showing gradual sales trend
Nonlinear caused by seasonal cycles. Most retail products are, however, irregular consuming products characterized
Book
by fluctuated and nonlinear sales trends. In this study, using high correlations between short- and long-
Consumer electronic device
term accumulated sales within similar products groups, a new forecasting model is presented. Based on
the correlation database of short- and long-term accumulations, the model provides a prediction of long-
term forecast using the sales result of the product’s very early release. For practical use, the model is
designed to deal with the following three points: accuracy; timing of forecast release; and the broad cov-
erage of items. As a case study, we applied the model to books and consumer electronics sold in Japan.
The model enables us to obtain a practical sales forecast throughout the lifecycle of the item one or
two week after its release, and furthermore provides valuable information on reprint decision-making.
This experiment will prove the reliability in accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method in compar-
ison with existing established ones.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction ozone concentration. However, Callen, Kwan, Yip, and Yuan

In comparison with the improvement of efficiency in industrial
production in these decades, the accuracy of demand forecasting
still remains at a low level. Mentzer and Bienstock (1996) pointed
that forecast of sales influences various decisions at the organiza-
tional level. Agrawal and Schorling (1996) also pointed out that
accurate demand forecasting plays an important role in profitable
retail operations. Inaccurate forecast, therefore, often leads to se-
vere business losses evident in both the cost of goods return and
opportunity loss. This is especially the case in irregular products
industries.
The existing quantitative approaches include heuristic methods
such as time series decomposition and exponential smoothing as
well as time series regression and autoregressive and integrated
moving average (ARIMA) models. Chu and Zhang (2003) claimed
linear methods as one of the major limitations of traditional meth-
ods. Users are unable to consider the complex relationships in the
data into those forecast except for seasonal analysis. There are,
therefore, researches on nonlinear modeling approach with neural
networks. Elkateb, Solaiman, and Al-Turki (1998) proposed that
neural network (NN) model in electric load forecasting showed
better performance than ARIMA models. Prybutok, Yi, and Mitchell
(2000) also reported the superiority of NN method in forecasting
* Tel.: +81 3 5841 6523; fax: +81 3 5802 3374.
E-mail address: kenji_tanaka@sys.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp
(1996), Darbellay and Slama (2000), and Kirby, Watson, and
Dougherty (1997) reported the opposite results. Their findings re-
vealed that neural network is not superior to the time series mod-
els even if the data are nonlinear. Without data of sales
performance of a test item within a certain period, forecast reliabil-
ity cannot be maintained. In addition, Faraway and Chatfield
(1998) reported that neural network model requires experimental
efforts and traditional modeling skills in order to fix each product
forecast settings. These problems, thus, illustrates that NN method
is not the best forecasting method for those industries with short
life cycle or wide variety products. Some other trials for combining
clustering technique and forecasting method have been reported
successful results (Chang & Lai, 2005; Chang, Lai, & Lai, 2006;
Chang & Liao, 2006; Chang & Liu, 2008). As for short life cycle prod-
ucts’ quarterly market forecasting, Trappey and Wu (2008) re-
ported better performance of the time-varying extended logistic
model compared with simple logistics model and the Gompertz
model. Nevertheless, those being interesting trials, it is still diffi-
cult to predict product model life cycle sales just a few days or
weeks after its release to support reproduction decision. Presently,
no method has been established as a standard forecasting method
for those nonlinear products.
One typical wide variety and short life cycle product is book re-
tail. There are serious problems of misleading forecast. Book sales
are neither seasonal nor cyclical, because their customers buy only
once. In addition to the shrinking market size, there remains high

0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2010.04.032
7388 K. Tanaka / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7387–7393

ratio of book return. According to annual report of The Research among relevant item groups. Fig. 1 shows an example of conver-
Institute for Publications (2007), approximately 40% of copies are gence transition in ratio of domestic sales in 182 days and first
returned to publishers as surplus-goods in Japan, which causes 7 days (Japanese 7660 literature titles). These high correlations
serious problems. Nagai (2004) estimated the total amount of are shown in Japanese book sales results without major structural
wasted book value at $13 billion USD in 2003. One of the main rea- changes in the following fields: existing retail process and existing
sons behind this is the misleading forecasts of players involved. item categories which are used for relevant grouping.
Publishers, wholesale-distributors and shop-chains have each pro- The basic concept of proposed forecasting method is illustrated
duce forecasts of their own. in Fig. 2. Left figure of Fig. 2 is a scatterplot of accumulated sales
The main objective of this study is to propose a forecasting results of two sales periods (nth day and mth day) with a best fit
method which can deal with the following three features: forecast- line. Using the correlation, the inclination (k) of best fit line with-
ing new-released items sales; providing forecast on proper timing out intercept is figured out. The target mth day sales forecast ðRm Þ
for management decision; and the simple process without collab- is calculated with the inclination k and nth day sales result (Rn).
orative setting of each item in order for broad coverage of items. We call this method ‘‘NM method”. This method predicts the
This study will verify its performance by applying it to book items mth day accumulated sales forecast ðRm Þ based on the nth day
forecasting. The evaluation of its accuracy and potential of contin- accumulated sales result Rn
uous improvement will be stated.
Rm ¼ kðgroup;m;nÞ  Rn ð1Þ
P  P  P 
N i X mi  X ni  X mi  i X ni
2. Proposed forecasting model kðgroup;m;nÞ ¼ P  iP 2 ð2Þ
2
N i ðX ni Þ  X
i mi
2.1. Proposed method
mth and nth are the number of days after the item release, Rn is an
Miyata, Tanaka, Sato, and Nishi (2008a, 2008b) reported that accumulated sales at nth day after the item release. ðRm Þ is the
there remains a high correlation between two sales-period results predicted value of Rm. k(group,n,m) is the NM coefficient of mth day

Titles Titles
200 200

150 150 Day5

100 100
Day1
50 50

0 0
1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37
Accumulated sales multiples of day182 by day1 Accumulated sales multiples of day182 by day5
Titles Titles
200 200 Day7

150 150

100 Day3 100

50 50

0 0
1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37
Accumulated sales multiples of day182 by day3 Accumulated sales multiples of day182 by day7

Fig. 1. Convergence example of the ratio of two accumulated sales in 182 days and short period sales.

nth-mth day accumulated sales results plot Concept of proposed forecast method

Sales Sales
(Items) (items)
Forecast
R*m = k Rn R*m
Sales
mth day

Result
Rn
R*m = k Rn

nth mth Day after

0
Sales release
0 nth day (items) present target

Fig. 2. Basic concept of NM forecasting.

 K. Tanaka / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7387–7393 7389

Table 1 day) are set in the first step. And then the latest accumulated sales
NM coefficient tables example. result Rn is obtained based on dynamic sales data. Thirdly, a refer-
m=1 2 3 4 5 6 182 ence group is selected and the coefficient k(group,n,m) is determined.
n=1 – 2.28 3.52 4.56 5.24 5.75 10.74 Rm is calculated according to Eq. (1). Rm should be updated when
2 – – 1.51 1.97 2.27 2.49 4.65 the dynamic database is updated.
3 – – – 1.33 1.54 1.69 3.16 Before the calculation process, the NM coefficient tables should
4 – – – – 1.17 1.30 2.43 be prepared with sample sales data. NM groups are defined by exist-
5 – – – – – 1.11 2.08
181 – – – – – – 1.00
ing categories or by experts. Then sample items’ data of each group
are collected, and NM coefficients of every nth–mth pair are calcu-
Sample items 71 titles. lated by Eq. (2). Reference groups are prepared in two patterns: gen-
erated by existing books categories or corrected by experts’
knowledge. For a newly released book, we have to decide the existing
forecast from nth day result in the ‘‘group”. N is the number of items group in which the book belongs to based on categories, publishers,
in the group. authors and so on. If the forecast is not adequate, new advanced NM
Each nth–mth pair has a NM coefficient in a group. NM coeffi- group can be then corrected by experts (Fig. 4). For example, certain
cient table is prepared for each group as shown in Table 1. key words or topics such as movies, TV shows, new prize can be used
in determining new advanced NM groups.
2.2. Proposed forecasting workflow In addition to original grouping, experts are able to use their
knowledge to maximize forecast accuracy.
Fig. 3 shows the forecasting workflow of the MN method. There Unlike the existing method which requires constant tunings,
are two main flows. One is the forecast calculation flow with dy- MN method allows the main forecast flow to be simple once the
namic sales database. The other is coefficient calculation flow. As coefficient tables are prepared, enabling to deal with various num-
for the former flow, the forecasting target item and period (mth bers of items.

Forecast Calculation Coefficient Calculation

by Existing Categories
Dynamic Define NM groups or Knowledge based features
Sales Data Obtain N th day
accumulated sales R N
-Tested Case
-Daily update Collect sample items
Sample Sales Data
of each group
-Sample cases
Select a Reference Group -Annual Data
of NM coefficient tables
Calculate each groups’
NM coefficient
Pick the NM coefficient
Of N th -M th day
Calculate NM
coefficient
NM coefficient table
Calculate Mth day forecast
R * m = k ( group ,m ,n) ⋅ R n
day=day+1

Output sales
forecast

Fig. 3. Forecasting workflow with proposed method.

Original Group by Existing Database

ISBN-code 4-06-370431-9
Title Name Doctor K
Original
Author Kazuo Mahune
Title Data Category Publisher Series Author
items Publisher Kodansha
Release date 2007/07/01
Category Literature

Advanced Group by knowledge

<1> Literature Comics Hot Topics, Theme

Experts’ <2> Medical drama
Added Movie, Reference
<3> Magazine TV shows,
Data items groups
News,
Corrected by experts
Prize,,,

Fig. 4. Knowledge-based grouping example.

7390 K. Tanaka / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7387–7393

2.3. Verification indicator
In order to evaluate the accuracy of the method, two indicators
are used. One is mean absolute percentage error (MAPE);
n  
1X 
 Ri ðmth dayÞ  1  100
MAPE ð%Þ ¼
N i¼1 Ri ðmth dayÞ  saler company. Since its share holds half of the Japanese book mar-
Ri is the actual sales volume of the item ‘‘i” on mth day after release.
ðRi Þ is the forecasted sales volume of the item ‘‘i” on mth day after
release. N is the number of test items.
The other indicator is the Proportion of Items with error rate
Under a certain Criteria (PIUC). This criterion is determined in ref-
erence to the return goods ratio of the items. It indicates the cov-
erage range of items suitable to the forecasting model.
3. Results
The MN model is applied to Japanese book industry and Japa-
nese consumer electronic devices industry. In order to be practical,
helpful tools for management decision, the real market data and
decision-making timeframe were used.
3.1. Book products forecasting case
In this section, the proposed NM forecasting method is verified
through its application to the Japanese book industry. Literature
category, a main category in the market, is selected as a testing
case.
3.1.1. Conditions of verification
The case data was collected by a Japanese leading book whole-
ð3Þ
ket, its data is considered as a reliable representative of the
industry. The daily sales data of all 7660 literature titles published
in 2006 in Japan are collected as sample cases. Based on this, we
predicted sales forecasts of 70 titles published by one company
in June 2007.
Since the 3rd–7th day is the first decision-making timeframe for
reprinting (Fig. 5), the forecast of nth (first 7 days) to mth (182th
day) is used for verification. Most books have their sales peaks
within three weeks after their releases, and publishers have to de-
cide how many copies to reprint without losing their business
chances. The target number of reprinting is decided with 6th
month forecast. According to Publishing Science Research Institute
(2007) the present book return ratio is about 40%. Then the target
accuracy level is set at 40%.
One of the key points of proposed method is to forecast not
weekly or daily sales but accumulated sales at certain point. For
comparison, two daily time series sales forecasting models, expo-
nential smoothing method (a = 0.5) and moving average method
(3-day average), are adopted. The accumulated forecast is calcu-
lated from their daily forecast. The duration of moving average

Sales Target
(items) Estimate
Forecasting Period
Period
Accumulated
Sales

Daily
Sales

0 First 7 days 182th day Days

(1 week) 6th month after release

Timing for The target period of

reprinting decision reprinting

Fig. 5. Forecasting timing and target period.

Fig. 6. Sixth month accumulated book sales forecast transition.

 K. Tanaka / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7387–7393 7391

period and the smoothing constant a is determined by the 7660
sample case analysis. The 3 days among 1- to 7-day cases and 0.5
among 0–1.0 cases obtained the best MAPE results. Since there
are only 7-day data points for calculation, complex models are tend
to amplify the small noise. That is one reason why simple two
methods are used. In addition to that, those two methods are com-
mon methods for Japanese book wholesaler and publishers.
For NM method forecasting, two existing-category-groups and
five knowledge-based groups were prepared as NM reference
groups. In other words, each item belonged to two existing-cate-
gory-groups and one knowledge-based group and therefore was
tested in three different ways.
3.1.2. Comparison to existing forecasting methods
Forecast result examples of Title A and Title B during the first
three weeks are shown in Fig. 6. The difference between the fore-
cast curve of each method and sales result is the number of error
books. Title A is the top sales title of the 70 titles. Title B is the
35th sales title (average title). Publisher group is referred to the
NM method forecasting here. Because of their sales peak of each ti-
tle, error numbers of books of both existing forecasting methods
are over 10 times as many as sales result.
The comparison of MAPE transitions during first 14 days are
shown in Fig. 7. While the existing forecasting methods have an er-
ror range up to 1000%, the NM methods showed the high accuracy
performance throughout first 14 days. The 7th day MAPE of each
1000%
900%
800%
700%
600%
MAPE
method is 546% (moving average), 204% (exponential method)
and 41% (NM method Publisher group).
The results of PIUC on the 7th day are indicated in Table 2. The
PIUC of NM method is 59%, which is ten times as many as those of
the other two methods. Thus, the NM method proved its perfor-
mance, while the existing method’s error rates never reached few-
er than 40% for over 90% of the titles.
3.1.3. Accuracy improvement by grouping
The performance of NM forecasting method is determined by
the reference grouping. In this section, a comparison is made be-
tween the existing group and knowledge-based group to recognize
whether there is room for improvement by grouping. It enables the
NM methods to incorporate the effective knowledge on the sales
trend.
There are various kinds of grouping axis: season of released,
the author, publisher, volume of print, price, appearance of cover
and so on. All of these attributes contribute to accuracy improve-
ment to some extent. Among those grouping axis, we focus on
the knowledge-based grouping as first step. The groups gener-
ated by wholesaler experts, who are in charge of company inter-
nal stock categories, are adopted. Various factors are taken into
account by them, but main ruling factors are found as follows:
target customer, shelf category at book store and publisher pro-
motion process. According to their rules, the knowledge-based
categories are prepared in addition to the two existing groups
of all literature and publisher A. They are general, comics, teens,
encyclopedic and academic (Fig. 8). As Table 3 shows, the stan-
dard deviations of teens, comic, academic and encyclopedic
NM Publisher groups are succeeded to be stabilized compared with that of for-
mer groups.
Moving Average The results of MAPE are shown in Table 4 and Fig. 9. The MAPE
of knowledge-based groups are always superior to those of other
Exponetial smoothing
two groups, all literature group and Publisher group. The MAPE im-

500%
prove by 15% from 41% of Publisher group to 25%. It needs only two
400%
days for MAPE to reach under 40%. The results of PIUC are shown in
300%
Table 5. The PIUC has risen by 28% from 59% of Publisher group to
200%
87%.
100%
0%
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Original Group Knowledge based 5 categories
N th day (the forecast is calculated) Sales
Main Customer Peak
Fig. 7. MAPE transition of 70 titles.
General Novels Public 2-6

Table 2 Literature Comic 20s-30s male 2-3

PIUC transition under ±40% error rate.
Literature Publisher Teens and Girls Teens 1-2
Forecasting Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 (All novels) (A)
method (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%)
Encyclopedic Middle-aged male 2-8
NM method 33 43 54 55 59 59 59
Publisher
Academic Intelligent layer 2-8
Moving average 1 4 1 0 0 0 1
Exponential 6 3 4 3 6 3 4
smoothing
Fig. 8. Knowledge-based grouping.

Table 3
Knowledge-based NM reference groups.

Reference groups All literature Publisher A Generala Teensa Comica Encyclopedica Accademica
NM reference groups and standard deviations
Number of reference cases 7206 664 281 71 117 73 63
Number of tested cases 69 69 30 13 10 8 8
Standard deviationb 5.88 1.55 1.75 0.41 1.04 1.41 0.75
a
Knowledge-based reference groups by wholesaler experts.
b
Standard deviation is calculated from the 182-day sales by 7 days.
7392 K. Tanaka / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7387–7393

Table 4 3.2. Consumer electronic products case

MAPE of 6-month forecasts based on 7-day result.

Forecasting methods MAa Exp.b NM NM MN In this section, the NM method is applied to consumer electronic
(%) (%) (all (publisher) (knowledge- products sales forecast to prove its generality over the industry. The
novels) (%) basedc) (%) sales data is collected by an electronic device company from 2008
(%)
to the beginning of 2009. There were 21 new-released items during
Publisher all 72 cases 546 204 61 41 25 the period. We tested the latest two items with other 19 sample
Knowledge-based group data. The accumulated sales forecast at the 100th day is predicted
General (30 cases) 492 194 33 26 29 based on 10 days sales result. We prepared three NM groups gener-
Teens (13 cases) 856 325 146 98 13
Comic (10 cases) 581 196 72 45 21
ated by existing product features in advance. The following three
Encyclopedic (8 cases) 474 171 36 23 49 are the groups: all 21 items, OEM group and usage group. OEM
Academic (8 cases) 271 92 41 19 12 group is divided into five OEM manufacturers, and usage group
Average 535 196 66 42 25 has four categories based on marketing targets. Two existing estab-
a
lished forecasting methods, exponential smoothing method
MA; moving average.
b (a = 0.5) and moving average method (3-day average), are calcu-
Exp; exponential smoothing.
c
NM (knowledge-based group) is calculated with each reference group NM lated to compare with the model. The return goods ratio of the
coefficient. items is about 30–40%. We set the target forecast at 30%.
The result of MAPE is indicated in Table 6. NM method (usage
group) maintains within 20% MAPE after 4th day. According to
the two test case results, NM method was efficient in practical
250% reproduction decision-making compared to the existing two
NM All literature
methods.
200%
NM Publisher
4. Conclusion
150% NM Knowledge based
MAPE

The research proposes a forecast model (NM model) for irregu-

100% lar and nonlinear sales items. NM model utilize high correlations
between two-period accumulated sales results within similar
50% products groups. The model allow us obtain a prediction of long-
term forecast using short-term sales result of the product’s very
0% early release. As case study, we apply this method to the Japanese
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 book market and the Japanese consumer electronic device market.
N th day (the forecast is calculated) It provides practical target accuracy from a very early stage (few
days after release) for manufactures’ reproduction decision and
Fig. 9. MAPE transitions with knowledge-based grouping.
shows better performance than existing linear methods in both
case. Furthermore, by incorporating experts’ knowledge as refer-
ence product group, the model proved its possibilities of continu-
Table 5 ous improvement in maximizing accuracy.
PIUC under ±40% error rate transitions with knowledge-based grouping. Further work to be studied is listed as follows:
Forecasting Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7
method (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) 1. The proposed method can be further investigated by incorpo-
NM all 17 30 41 48 49 52 51
rating not only experts’ knowledge but also other useful tech-
literature niques, clustering and data mining techniques for grouping.
NM method 33 43 54 55 59 59 59 Knowledge-based grouping is helpful to find effective factors
publisher to be taken into account. The next grouping step should be sci-
NM knowledge 41 61 65 70 84 86 87
entific and automatic with those factors. K-means clustering is a
based
method of cluster analysis which aims to partition n observa-
tions into k clusters in which each observation belongs to the
cluster with the nearest mean.
The accuracy of the model is superior to existing linear methods 2. Since the forecasting timing and target period of this case study
with simple grouping. Furthermore, those facts indicate much is rather unique, the verification studies in this paper were lim-
space for improvement by incorporating proper grouping. Stan- ited. Further, accuracy verification work of this method must be
dard deviation is one of the indicators of forecast accuracy in NM pursued.
groups. A low standard deviation means that items of the group 3. Since target accuracy rate is satisfied, the practical manage-
have few sales trend variations. The best groups of MAPE value ment decision support system with this model should be
in Table 4 have low standard deviations in Table 3. developed and verified. Several companies, including publishers

Table 6
MAPE transition of electronic consumer devices.

Forecasting method Day 1 (%) Day 2 (%) Day 3 (%) Day 4 (%) Day 5 (%) Day 6 (%) Day 7 (%) Day 8 (%) Day 9 (%) Day 10 (%)
NM all 21 items 32 31 31 26 23 18 16 20 21 19
NM OEM group 51 51 50 37 31 25 24 27 28 25
NM usage group 32 27 21 16 12 12 12 16 17 13
Moving average 501 388 313 249 214 182 160 151 144 133
Exponential smoothing 298 183 128 76 81 58 81 68 62 60
 K. Tanaka / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7387–7393
or wholesalers, are preparing their trial use. Review of real time
marching experiment will be studied.
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