Demand forecasting applications have immensely benefited from the state-of-the-art Deep Learning methods used for time series forecasting. Traditional uni-modal models are predominantly seasonality driven which attempt to model the demand as a function of historic sales along with information on holidays and promotional events. However, accurate and robust sales forecasting calls for accommodating multiple other factors, such as natural calamities, pandemics, elections, etc., impacting the demand for products and product categories in general. We propose a multi-modal sales forecasting network that combines real-life events from news articles with traditional data such as historical sales and holiday information. Further, we fuse information from general product trends published by Google trends. Empirical results show statistically significant improvements in the SMAPE error metric with an average improvement of 7.37% against the existing state-of-the-art sales forecasting techniques on a real-world supermarket dataset.

通过整合新闻详情中真实生活事件、历史销售数据、节假日信息以及Google Trends产品趋势数据，提出了一种多模式销售预测网络，该网络在超市实际数据集中比现有的销售预测技术具有统计显著性的改进，平均SMAPE误差率提高了7.37％。

需求预测的多模态神经网络