Patent ID: 8583477

Claim:
An apparatus for product sales baseline determination, comprising: a processor and a memory programmed to implement: a data preparation and alignment engine to receive sales data for a product and causal data identifying a promotional event from a point of sale, the sales data organized in a time series for a time period, the data preparation and alignment engine to correlate the product sales data with the causal data to exclude sales data corresponding to the promotional event identified in the causal data to generate non-promoted sales data for the product; and a modeling engine to process the non-promoted sales data using a smoothed moving average model including a smoothing constant, the smoothed moving average model comprising an exponentially smoothed moving average model and a smoothing constant to provide relative higher weight to newer sales data and relative lower weight to older sales data by assigning exponentially decreasing weights as the sales data becomes older in time, the exponentially smoothed moving average model comprising a) a double exponentially smoothed moving average model or b) a single exponentially smoothed moving average model to be selected based on a determination of trend and seasonality in the time series data, the exponentially smoothed moving average model involving a plurality of passes through the non-promoted sales data to generate expected base data for the product from the exponentially smoothed moving average model, the plurality of passes including a) executing a backward pass through the non-promoted sales data, b) executing a forward pass through the non-promoted sales data, and c) averaging the backward and forward passes, the modeling engine to output the expected base data for the product to a user by at least one of generating a visual depiction of the expected base data for display to the user and generating a machine-readable representation of the expected base data for further processing.