{"id":16340,"date":"2024-11-21T10:02:38","date_gmt":"2024-11-21T07:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalit.com.tr\/how-to-forecast-demand-with-google-vertex-ai-automl-demand-forecasting\/"},"modified":"2025-01-08T13:14:24","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T10:14:24","slug":"how-to-forecast-demand-with-google-vertex-ai-automl-demand-forecasting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalit.com.tr\/en\/how-to-forecast-demand-with-google-vertex-ai-automl-demand-forecasting\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Forecast Demand with Google Vertex AI AutoML Demand Forecasting?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Demand forecasting is critical for businesses to optimize their inventory and production, increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. However, doing this task manually can be difficult and time-consuming. <\/p>\n\n
Google Vertex AI AutoML Demand Forecasting is a machine learning service that helps businesses meet this challenge automatically. This service enables businesses to forecast future demand using historical sales data and other relevant data. <\/p>\n\n
Advantages of Vertex AI AutoML Demand Forecasting:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Vertex AI AutoML Demand Forecasting is suitable for use in a wide range of industries and businesses. For example, a retail business can use this service to forecast future demand for products to be sold, helping the company to optimize inventories and improve customer satisfaction. A manufacturing company can also use this service to forecast future production needs, helping the company to reduce production costs and increase profitability. <\/p>\n\n In summary, Vertex AI AutoML Demand Forecasting is a powerful tool for businesses to automate the demand forecasting process and improve its accuracy. This service can help businesses optimize their inventory and production, increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. <\/p>\n\n How to Use Vertex AI AutoML Demand Forecasting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n To use Vertex AI AutoML Demand Forecasting, follow the steps below:<\/p>\n\n In order to better understand the progression of the steps, a visualized and detailed guide is presented below.<\/p>\n\n We enter the “Vertex AI Datasets”<\/strong> tab. Here we give our dataset a unique name. From the “Tabular”<\/strong> tab, select “Forecasting”<\/strong>, determine the location under the “Region”<\/strong> section and create our dataset. <\/p>\n\n Image 1:<\/em><\/strong> Vertex AI Dataset creation.<\/p>\n\n After creating a “dataset”<\/strong>, we determine the source of our dataset. Here you can upload a CSV file from local (from your personal computer) or Cloud Storage, or a table or view from BigQuery. <\/p>\n\n Image 2:<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>Selecting source for datasets.<\/p>\n\n We can train a new model by selecting the “Train new model”<\/strong> option on our created dataset. In the window that opens, we select the training method suitable for our dataset. <\/p>\n\n Image 3<\/em><\/strong>: <\/strong>Model Training and Methods<\/p>\n\n After determining our model according to our needs and capabilities, the next step is to reshape the model according to our needs. For this, the steps that appear in the next window can be explained as follows: <\/p>\n\n Image 4:<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>Model Training Details<\/p>\n\n 5. Separating and Making Sense of the Model’s Data<\/strong><\/p>\n\n When training ML models, data is usually divided into three parts: Training<\/strong>, Validation<\/strong> and Testing<\/strong>. Training, which constitutes a large percentage, is the data that will be used to train the model. Testing and Validation data are used to see how well the trained model will make predictions on datasets it has never seen before. According to the results here, the performance of the model is interpreted and improvements are made if necessary. AutoML does this automatically for us. The details and usage of the interface can be explained as follows. <\/p>\n\n Image 5:<\/em><\/strong> Separating the Model’s dataset for meaningful use.<\/p>\n\n 6. Rolling Window Strategy Setting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The next step after separating your data in a meaningful way is to set “rolling window strategies” in a little more detail. To explain this setting in more detail: <\/p>\n\n The dataset used for forecasting is created using a window shifted in time. The size of the window is called the “context window”<\/strong>. ” Rolling window strategies<\/strong> are an effective way to capture patterns in time series data, such as trends and seasonality. By capturing these patterns, more accurate forecasts can be obtained. <\/p>\n\n By default, “max count”<\/strong> is selected. The maximum window is targeted over the unit selected in the “Data granularity”<\/strong> section. For options such as seasonal or weekly, “Stride length”<\/strong> can be configured by selecting “Stride length”, and<\/strong> if you want to determine the strategy by adding columns by default, you can select “column” <\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n Image 6:<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>Determining Rolling Window Strategy<\/p>\n\n 7. Interpreting Columns for Forecasting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n After determining the model details, we continue by entering column-based details in the “Training options”<\/strong> section to edit each column where the data in the model we have is separated and make better predictions.<\/p>\n\n Image 7:<\/em><\/strong> <\/em>Column Adjustment for Forecasting<\/p>\n\n After the columns are interpreted for the model, we can use the “weight column”<\/strong> feature to characterize which rows are more important for us. In the default settings, each column is weighted equally by the model, but if there are rows that we want to weigh more in the model, we can create a “weight” <\/strong>column for these rows and increase the impact of these rows on the model. <\/p>\n\n Once the important columns have been identified, the optimization objective for our model is selected: <\/p>\n\n Image 8:<\/em><\/strong> Weight Column and Optimization Objective Selection<\/p>\n\n Time series are often structured in a nested hierarchy. For example, the entire inventory of products sold by a retailer can be divided into product categories. Categories can also be broken down into individual products. When forecasting future sales, forecasts for the products of a category should be added to forecasts for the category itself, raising the hierarchy. Similarly, the time dimension of a single time series can also exhibit a hierarchy. For example, forecasted sales at the day level for a single product should be added to the forecast weekly sales of the product. <\/p>\n\n Hierarchical forecasting in Vertex AI takes into account the hierarchical structure of the time series by including additional loss terms for aggregated forecasts. For example, if the hierarchical group is “category”, the forecasts at the “category” level are the sum of forecasts for all “products” in the category. If the objective of the model is the mean absolute error (MAE), the loss will include the MAE for forecasts at both the “product” and “category” levels. This helps to improve the consistency of forecasts at different levels of the hierarchy and in some cases can even improve metrics at the lowest level. <\/p>\n\n When hierarchical estimation is selected, we are presented with three options: <\/p>\n\n When we select Group by columns<\/strong> or group all<\/strong> options, the following configurations are opened:<\/p>\n\n Image 9:<\/em><\/strong> Hierarchical Forecasting Settings<\/p>\n\n 10. Running the Model and Budget Setting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n After all configurations are completed, budget <\/strong>adjustment is made on the basis of hours of operation. 1 to 3 hours for 100,000 rows, 3 to 6 hours for up to 1,000,000 rows, 12 hours for up to 10,000,000 rows and then as the number of rows increases, the training time and fee can be adjusted by doubling the budget every 10 floors. <\/p>\n\n Image 10:<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>Budget Setting<\/p>\n\n Conclusion and Recommendations<\/strong><\/p>\n\n After following the steps, you now have an AI model that you can easily use in your business. Here are a few suggestions to further improve your model in the future: <\/p>\n\n To summarize what has been done, even if we do not have enough hardware for our existing businesses and processes, we can easily incorporate artificial intelligence solutions into our processes using Vertex AI AutoML. In this way, automated processes that are much more optimized and successful can be achieved. We hope that this article, written as a guide, will help you to include artificial intelligence in your processes by following the steps. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Demand forecasting is critical for businesses to optimize their inventory and production, increase customer satisfaction…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":17369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,74],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16340","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning","8":"category-data-management-and-analytics"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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