Monthly car sales prediction using Internet Word-of-Mouth (eWOM)

Internet's mature has changed the behavior of consumers. Most of consumers before purchase will queries opinion on the Internet. Vehicle is high priced and durable merchandise, so consumer would be more prudent to view Internet opinion before they buy. Past research has pointed out eWOM (electronic Word-of-Mouth) and customer satisfaction will influence purchasing decision, 70% of consumers believe eWOM. In this study, we utilizes economic indexes, Internet “word of mouth”, and Google Trends variables created by key word searches to forecast the monthly sales volumes of a given model of car. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed GA/KNN model has the highest predictive power in terms of Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE).