Color Trend Forecasting of Fashionable Products with Very Few Historical Data

In time-series forecasting, statistical methods and various newly emerged models, such as artificial neural network (ANN) and grey model (GM), are often used. No matter which forecasting method one would apply, it is always a huge challenge to make a sound forecasting decision under the condition of having very few historical data. Unfortunately, in fashion color trend forecasting, the availability of data is always very limited owing to the short selling season and life of products. This motivates us to examine different forecasting models for their performances in predicting color trend of fashionable product under the condition of having very few data. By employing real sales data from a fashion company, we examine various forecasting models, namely ANN, GM, Markov regime switching, and GM+ANN hybrid models, in the domain of color trend forecasting with a limited amount of historical data. Comparisons are made among these models. Insights on the appropriate choice of forecasting models are generated.