Random Forests for Store Forecasting at Walmart Scale

The SMART Forecasting team at Walmart Labs is tasked with providing demand forecasts for over 70 million store-item combinations every week! For example, just how much of every type of ginger needs to go to every Walmart store in the U.S., every week for the next 52 weeks, with the goal of improving in stocks and reducing food waste. Our algorithm strategy was to build a suite of machine learning models and deploy them at scale to generate bespoke solutions for (oh so many!) store-item-week combinations. Random Forests would be part of this suite. We went through the traditional model development workflow of data discovery, identifying demand drivers, feature engineering, training, cross validation and testing.