Forecasting seasonally fluctuating sales of perishable products in the horticultural industry

Accurately forecasting demand is a potential competitive advantage, especially when dealing with perishable products. The multi-billion dollar horticultural industry is highly affected by perishability, but has received limited attention in forecasting research. In this paper, we analyze the applicability of general compared to dataset-specific predictors, as well as the influence of external information and online model update schemes. We employ a heterogeneous set of horticultural data, three classical, and twelve machine learning-based forecasting approaches. Our results show a superiority of multivariate machine learning methods, in particular the ensemble learner XGBoost. These advantages highlight the importance of external factors, with the feature set containing statistical, calendrical, and weather-related features leading to the most robust performance. We further observe that a general model is unable to capture the heterogeneity of the data and is outperformed by dataset-specific predictors. Moreover, frequent model updates have a negligible impact on forecasting quality, allowing long-term forecasting without significant performance degradation.