The 4th instalment of weekend hackathon series is here, and this time we challenge data scientists to forecast the sales of grocery items in MachineHack’s Grocery Sales Forecast: Weekend Hackathon #4.

The challenge will start on May 8th Friday at 6 pm IST.

Problem Statement & Description

Sales forecasting has always been one of the most predominant applications of machine learning. Big companies like Walmart have been employing this technique to achieve steady and enormous growth over decades now. In this challenge, you as a data scientist must use machine learning to help a small grocery store in predicting its future sales and making better business decisions.

Given the daily sales of a grocery shop recorded over a period of almost 2 years, your objective as a data scientist is to build a machine learning model that can forecast the sales for the upcoming 3 months.

You are provided with the recorded observation of daily sales of a grocery shop over a period of 692 days to forecast the sales of the next 90 days.

Data Description

The unzipped folder will have the following files.

• Train.csv – 692 observations
• Test.csv – 90 observations
• Sample Submission – Sample format for the submission

Target Variable: GrocerySales

The datasets will be made available for download on May 8th, Friday at 6 pm IST

Below are the file formats for the provided data

Train.csv

Test.csv

Sample_Submission.xlsx

Bounties

The top 3 competitors will receive a cool AIM goodie bag and a free pass to the plugin.

plugin, India’s largest virtual conference on AI, is a next-gen disruptive conference that brings AI professionals from around the world together in a virtual setting.

Know more about the plugin here.

Rules

1. One account per participant. Submissions from multiple accounts will lead to disqualification
2. The submission limit for the hackathon is 10 per day after which the submission will not be evaluated
3. All registered participants are eligible to participate in the hackathon
4. This competition counts towards your overall ranking points
5. You will not be able to submit once you click the “Complete Hackathon” button. You may ignore this feature
6. We ask that you respect the spirit of the competition and do not cheat
7. This hackathon will expire on 11th May, Monday at 7 am IST

Evaluation

The leaderboard is evaluated using Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) for the participant’s submission.