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Forecasting third-party mobile payments with implications for customer flow prediction

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  • Ma, Shaohui
  • Fildes, Robert

Abstract

Forecasting customer flow is key for retailers in making daily operational decisions, but small retailers often lack the resources to obtain such forecasts. Rather than forecasting stores’ total customer flows, this research utilizes emerging third-party mobile payment data to provide participating stores with a value-added service by forecasting their share of daily customer flows. These customer transactions using mobile payments can then be utilized further to derive retailers’ total customer flows indirectly, thereby overcoming the constraints that small retailers face. We propose a third-party mobile-payment-platform centered daily mobile payments forecasting solution based on an extension of the newly-developed Gradient Boosting Regression Tree (GBRT) method which can generate multi-step forecasts for many stores concurrently. Using empirical forecasting experiments with thousands of time series, we show that GBRT, together with a strategy for multi-period-ahead forecasting, provides more accurate forecasts than established benchmarks. Pooling data from the platform across stores leads to benefits relative to analyzing the data individually, thus demonstrating the value of this machine learning application.

Suggested Citation

  • Ma, Shaohui & Fildes, Robert, 2020. "Forecasting third-party mobile payments with implications for customer flow prediction," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 739-760.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:intfor:v:36:y:2020:i:3:p:739-760
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2019.08.012
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    Cited by:

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    2. Makridakis, Spyros & Spiliotis, Evangelos & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2022. "Predicting/hypothesizing the findings of the M5 competition," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 1337-1345.
    3. Ma, Shaohui & Fildes, Robert, 2021. "Retail sales forecasting with meta-learning," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 288(1), pages 111-128.
    4. Semenoglou, Artemios-Anargyros & Spiliotis, Evangelos & Makridakis, Spyros & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2021. "Investigating the accuracy of cross-learning time series forecasting methods," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 1072-1084.
    5. Ma, Shaohui & Fildes, Robert, 2022. "The performance of the global bottom-up approach in the M5 accuracy competition: A robustness check," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 1492-1499.
    6. Liu, Hsiu-Wen, 2024. "Mining spatial-temporal patterns from customer data to improve forecasting of customer flow across multiple sites," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).

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