Audience
Anyone looking to improve forecasting without having any machine learning experience yet
About Amazon Forecast
Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts.
Companies today use everything from simple spreadsheets to complex financial planning software to attempt to accurately forecast future business outcomes such as product demand, resource needs, or financial performance. These tools build forecasts by looking at a historical series of data, which is called time series data. For example, such tools may try to predict the future sales of a raincoat by looking only at its previous sales data with the underlying assumption that the future is determined by the past. This approach can struggle to produce accurate forecasts for large sets of data that have irregular trends. Also, it fails to easily combine data series that change over time (such as price, discounts, web traffic, and number of employees) with relevant independent variables like product features and store locations.