The Challenge - One challenge of modeling retail data is the need to make decisions based on limited history. Holidays and select major events come once a year, and so does the chance to see how strategic decisions impacted the bottom line. In addition, markdowns are known to affect sales – the challenge is to predict which departments will be affected and to what extent.
You are provided with historical sales data for 45 stores located in different regions - each store contains a number of departments. The company also runs several promotional markdown events throughout the year. These markdowns precede prominent holidays, the four largest of which are the Super Bowl, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The weeks including these holidays are weighted five times higher in the evaluation than non-holiday weeks.
Within the Excel Sheet, there are 3 Tabs – Stores, Features and Sales
Anonymized information about the 45 stores, indicating the type and size of store
Contains additional data related to the store, department, and regional activity for the given dates.
Historical sales data, which covers to 2010-02-05 to 2012-11-01. Within this tab you will find the following fields: