Sales Prediction of a Pharmaceutical Distribution Company

The study aims to find an appropriate model to extract insights from the sales of a Pharmaceutical Distribution Company (PDC) and make it available in an interactive and readable manner for the company. In PDCs, it is highly important to obtain a good approximation of the medicine needs, due to the short shelf life of many medicines and the need to control stock levels. The presented method is a combination of analysis and interactive visualization tools along with prediction. In this paper, we explore the use of Support Vector Regression algorithm for the sales prediction of individual products. The proposed model helps to present the sales data in a better way such that understanding the trends and seasonality becomes easier for the PDCs. The dataset has information of hourly, daily, weekly and monthly sales of the drugs and hence the end results also give us a likely classified understanding of the sales. The study of the results obtained, suggest that the proposed model may be considered appropriate for product sales prediction