Statistical Models Commons^™

Machine Learning Based Restaurant Sales Forecasting, Austin B. Schmidt

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

To encourage proper employee scheduling for managing crew load, restaurants have a need for accurate sales forecasting. We predict partitions of sales days, so each day is broken up into three sales periods: 10:00 AM-1:59 PM, 2:00 PM-5:59 PM, and 6:00 PM-10:00 PM. This study focuses on the middle timeslot, where sales forecasts should extend for one week. We gather three years of sales between 2016-2019 from a local restaurant, to generate a new dataset for researching sales forecasting methods.

Outlined are methodologies used when going from raw data to a workable dataset. We test many machine learning models on …