Time series sales forecasting

Time series forecasting is an important area of machine learning . … However, while the time component adds additional information, it also makes time series problems more difficult to handle compared to many other prediction tasks.

A time series is a data set that tracks a sample over time. In particular, a time series allows one to see what factors influence certain variables from period to period . Time series analysis can be useful to see how a given asset, security, or economic variable changes over time.

The Microsoft Time Series algorithm provides multiple algorithms that are optimized for forecasting continuous values, such as product sales, over time . Whereas other Microsoft algorithms, such as decision trees, require additional columns of new information as input to predict a trend, a time series model does not.