Mining the past to determine the future market: Sales forecasting using TSDM framework

Sales forecasting is widely recognized, and it is evidently improved the quality of business strategy. It is necessary to understand the sales trend of a service provider business to monitor or predict future income or profit loss. COPYTRADE is a photocopier service provider that houses its branches near the schools and inside the malls where students are commonly found. Since there were several branches in different locations, consolidation of sales per day is hard for the owners particularly in areas where technology is still not within reach of the people. Time series data mining (TSDM) was used in order to determine sales trend of the company in different branches. This would help them in predicting sales trend throughout the year. This could lead in better management of their resources like machine, materials, and manpower. Aside from TSDM, clustering, classification and regression was used to further enhance the data mining activity in COPYTRADE.