Product demand forecasts using wavelet kernel support vector machine and particle swarm optimization in manufacture system

Demand forecasts play a crucial role in supply chain management. The future demand for a certain product is the basis for the respective replenishment systems. Aiming at demand series with small samples, seasonal character, nonlinearity, randomicity and fuzziness, the existing support vector kernel does not approach the random curve of the sales time series in the L2(Rn) space (quadratic continuous integral space). In this paper, we present a hybrid intelligent system combining the wavelet kernel support vector machine and particle swarm optimization for demand forecasting. The results of application in car sale series forecasting show that the forecasting approach based on the hybrid PSOWvv-SVM model is effective and feasible, the comparison between the method proposed in this paper and other ones is also given, which proves that this method is, for the discussed example, better than hybrid PSOvv-SVM and other traditional methods.