Kaggle-Walmart Sales Forecasting

In early 2014, Kaggle-Walmart announced a recruiting competition using historical markdown data to predict store sales. One challenge of modeling retail data is the need to make decisions based on limited history. If Christmas comes but once a year, so does the chance to see how strategic decisions impacted the bottom line.

In this recruiting competition, job-seekers are provided with historical sales data for 45 Walmart stores located in different regions. Each store contains many departments, and participants must project the sales for each department in each store. To add to the challenge, selected holiday markdown events are included in the dataset. These markdowns are known to affect sales, but it is challenging to predict which departments are affected and the extent of the impact.

Since May 2014, the competition has been closed and the winners were announced. For more information about the competition, check here (Note: There are many other interesting on-going competition projects).

For this homework, you are asked to access and explore the datasets of Walmart sales used in this recruiting competition. Other details will be announced in class.