Evaluation of Several Error Measures Applied to the Sales Forecast System of Chemicals Supply Enterprises

Abstract

The objective of the industry in general, and of the chemical industry in particular, is to satisfy consumer demand for products and the best way to satisfy it is to forecast future sales and plan its operations.

Considering that the choice of the best sales forecast model will largely depend on the accuracy of the selected indicator (Tofallis, 2015), in this work, seven techniques are compared, in order to select the most appropriate, for quantifying the error presented by the sales forecast models. These error evaluation techniques are: Mean Percentage Error (MPE), Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Mean Absolute Scaled Error (MASE), Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE) and Mean Absolute Arctangent Percentage Error (MAAPE). Forecasts for chemical product sales, to which error evaluation techniques are applied, are those obtained and reported by Castillo, et. al. (2016 & 2020).

The error measuring techniques whose calculation yields adequate and convenient results, for the six prediction techniques handled in this article, as long as its interpretation is intuitive, are SMAPE and MAAPE. In this case, the most adequate technique to measure the error presented by the sales prediction system turned out to be SMAPE.