Sales Forecasting Using the Meta-learning Method (Case study: Aluminum Sales in Iran’s Mercantile Exchange Market)

Market sales forecasting has a special role in the analysis of marketing opportunities. Along the same line, sales forecasting plays an important role in the planning of different departments of an organization

Accordingly, the main goal of this research is to use one of the new tools in the field of machine learning (the meta-learning method) to predict the number of sales with a case study. Aluminum is sold in the Iran Mercantile Exchange.

The current research is included in the category of applied research and the research data were collected using secondary data sources. The data available in the weekly reports published on the official website of the Iran Mercantile Exchange Organization has been used for analysis. The steps of conducting the research are based on the principles of prediction and using the meta-learning approach.

The findings of the current research show how to use the meta-learning method to predict the amount of sales and estimate the demand for aluminum in the Iranian Mercantile Exchange. The model is presented using the meta-learning method based on 4 basic prediction methods of the neural network, ARIMA, regression, and exponential smoothing in line with time series data related to aluminum sales in the Iran Mercantile Exchange (including 344 time periods from 2015 to 2022).

Examining the accuracy of the results of using the meta-learning method to predict sales has shown the superiority of this method compared to four other selected prediction methods. In this research, three stages of validation were conducted to verify the results obtained, and in the results of all three validation samples, the superiority of the accuracy of the meta-learning method was confirmed. The capability of this method to solve the prediction problem is one of the capabilities of using artificial intelligence tools in solving different management problems. As a result, the meta-learning method has been introduced to marketing managers and researchers as a powerful tool in the field of sales forecasting.