World Models, Trees and Foundation Models for Retail Forecasting: Evidence from Four Public Data Sets

Abstract

A retailer makes different decisions at different grains of the product, store and time hierarchy: store orders for an item in a store, supplier funding for an item across stores, category performance by store, and the financial plan for the chain. Which forecasting model to use depends on the grain. This paper compares models at each grain on four public data sets (M5, six Dominick's categories, Breakfast at the Frat, and Corporación Favorita, the last kept out of all development), over rolling forecast origins with paired tests and model confidence sets. It covers price and promotion through the plan inputs these data record, not product, assortment or place. The models are a world model that carries each item's state forward under the price and promotion plan, the same network without that state, LightGBM, the Temporal Fusion Transformer, TimesFM, Chronos-Bolt, Timestral, seasonal naive, and an equal-weight average of the world model, LightGBM and TimesFM given the plan. The answer changed with the grain. For an item by store and an item across stores, the average had the lowest error on seven and eight of nine data sets, and the 90% confidence set held a median of 1 and 2 models. For a category by store, a category and the chain total, the lowest-error model differed between data sets and a median of 4 of nine models were not separated by the four to six windows available. For category-by-store planning cost, the average or LightGBM was lowest on seven of eight data sets, and the world model was lowest only on M5; it was behind LightGBM item by store on six of eight. Every trained model used the plan, and on the weekly promotion-driven data pretrained models were less accurate without it. These results hold for these data sets; a forecast solved across all four Ps, or a retailer's own data, may give different results. Every model, test and change that lost is reported.