Learning Invariant Representations for New Product Sales Forecasting via Multi-Granularity Adversarial Learning

Zhenzhen Chu, Chengyu Wang, Cen Chen, Dawei Cheng, Yuqi Liang, Weining Qian

Abstract: Sales forecasting during the launch of new products has always been a challenging task, due to the lack of historical sales data. The dynamic market environment and consumer preferences also increase the uncertainty of predictions. Large chains face even greater difficulties due to their extensive presence across various regions. Traditional time-series forecasting methods usually rely on statistical models and empirical judgments, which are difficult to handle large, variable data and often fail to achieve satisfactory performance for new products. In this paper, we propose a Multi-granularity AdversaRial Learning framework (MARL) to leverage knowledge from old products and improve the quality of invariant representations for more accurate sales predictions. To evaluate our proposed method, we conducted extensive experiments on both a real-world dataset from a prominent international Café chain and a public dataset. The results demonstrated that our method is more effective than the existing state-of-the-art baselines for new product sales forecasting.