主管:中国科学院
主办:中国优选法统筹法与经济数学研究会
   中国科学院科技战略咨询研究院

Chinese Journal of Management Science ›› 2024, Vol. 32 ›› Issue (1): 260-267.doi: 10.16381/j.cnki.issn1003-207x.2020.0816

Previous Articles    

A Data-driven Single-Period Newsvendor Problem Based on XGBoost Algorithm

Yuting Yan,Wenjie Bi()   

  1. School of Business,Central South University,Changsha 410083,China
  • Received:2020-05-08 Revised:2020-10-20 Online:2024-01-25 Published:2024-02-08
  • Contact: Wenjie Bi E-mail:beenjoy@126.com

Abstract:

Solving single-period newsvendor problem usually assumes that the demand distribution follows a particular form, predicts demand from historical data, then solves optimization models. Although this assumption simplifies the analysis, it does not reflect the true distribution of demand over time and inevitably passes on historical estimated prediction errors to the optimization process. To solve this problem, a method that combines estimation and optimization is proposed. This method adopts the form of data-driven weights to deal with the demand uncertainty related to features and introduces XGBoost algorithm to solve single- period newsvendor problem with non-stationary demand. After observing the features that affect demand, the method directly determines the optimal inventory decision. This paper's contribution to the field of operations management mainly includes twofold: 1) It integrates a scalable end-to-end tree boosting system called XGBoost into a single-period newsvendor problem. 2) The integrated estimation optimization algorithm is applied to a real-world data set under different target service levels and training sample sizes, and is compared with several standard methods for studying newsvendor problems. The results show that this method can reduce inventory costs by at least about 5%.

Key words: newsvendor, machine learning, sample average approximation, quantile regression, optimization

CLC Number: