Category: Forecasting & Demand Planning
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Six Times They Tried to Prove Sophistication Wins
Forty years of open forecasting competitions, and the winner’s margin over a dumb average stayed thin. Then M6 asked whether accuracy makes money. The correlation was 0.04.
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I Raced Amazon’s Forecasting AI Against a 66-Year-Old Formula. The Formula Won.
I put Amazon’s zero-shot forecasting AI against five classical models on 148 real retail series. A formula from 1960 beat a 205-million-parameter model by 14 to 16%.
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Does Your Forecast Beat a Sticky Note? The Placebo Test for Demand Planning
Your forecast has exactly one job: beat a sticky note that says ‘same as last year.’ Most don’t. Here’s the placebo test that proves it.
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30 Books Every Forecaster, Demand Planner, and S&OP Lead Should Read — The Inphronesys Bookshelf
An interactive 30-book bookshelf for forecasters, demand planners, S&OP leads, supply chain strategists, and the data scientists who keep them honest. Filter by category and level, build a reading list for your role.
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The Folly of Forecasting
From the Pythia at Delphi to Google’s GraphCast — humans have always demanded the future. Why some forecasts have gotten dramatically better, why others haven’t, and why AI will not deliver the silver bullet.
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Why VAR Beat Google’s TimesFM — and How to Build One in R
A peer-reviewed 2025 study put Google’s TimesFM foundation model head-to-head with vector autoregression on real hospital data. Spoiler: the 1980s econometric model won. Here’s what VAR is, why it works for supply chain, and how to build one in R.
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Global Forecasting with XGBoost in R: A Walmart Weekly Walkthrough
A hands-on walkthrough of global XGBoost forecasting in R with tidymodels and modeltime, applied to the Walmart weekly sales dataset. What the feature importance reveals, when ML earns its complexity, and when ETS or SNAIVE quietly wins.
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The 20 Most Influential People in Forecasting (And What to Learn From Each)
A TIME 100-style guide to the academics, ML engineers, and supply chain voices who shaped modern forecasting — and the one resource to start with for each.