Patent ID: 8224688

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for transforming transactional data into a forecast of demand for controlling a commerce system, comprising: recording transactional data related to a movement of goods between members of a commerce system, the transactional data including price, product, time, promotion, and customer; estimating, by a processor, daily disaggregating parameters (DDP) by minimizing an error function of day of week and transactional data grouped according to promotion, price range, or customer; estimating, by a processor, model parameters based on the DDP and transactional data using a demand model to generate a weekly forecast of demand for the goods; disaggregating, by a processor, the weekly forecast of demand into daily components using the DDP; determining, by a processor, the daily components of the weekly forecast of demand by minimizing the error function given by: error ⁢ ⁢ ( k , d , t ) = Txn ⁡ ( k , t ) ⁢ ( w ⁡ ( d ) - w act ⁡ ( k , d , t ) ⁢ ( ∑ d ⁢ ⁢ ε / ( k , t ) ⁢ ⁢ w ⁡ ( d ) ) ) ; and providing the daily components of the weekly forecast of demand for the goods to a member of the commerce system to control the movement of goods in the commerce system.