Design demand forecasting
Medium45 minFree, no account
A forecast whose errors cost different amounts in each direction, evaluated by a split nobody gets right.
The question
Design the system that forecasts how much of each product each warehouse will sell next week, to drive restocking.
100,000 products, 50 warehouses.
Functional
- A weekly forecast per product per warehouse, with an uncertainty range.
- Handle new products with no history and products with intermittent demand.
- Forecasts must roll up consistently to region and national totals.
Non-functional
- 5M series, refreshed daily.
- Over-forecasting costs holding and waste; under-forecasting costs a lost sale.
- Buyers must be able to see why a number changed.
45:00Commit to an answer before you open the solution. Reading it first teaches you to recognise good answers, which is not the skill being tested.
Stuck?
0 of 3 hints takenThe worked solution
written by a person · not a gradeScore yourself
0 of 5 marked- Rolling-origin backtesting with a latency gap, not a random split30
- Asymmetric, category-specific loss via quantiles25
- A global model with a stated baseline, and intermittent demand handled separately20
- Hierarchical reconciliation so levels agree15
- Noticed censoring from stock-outs10
We run no AI here and nothing on this page grades you. The score is yours, and the useful number is the one you get on the same problem a month from now, cold.
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