International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics

Volume 119 No. 7 2018, 797-805

ISSN: 1311-8080 (printed version); ISSN: 1314-3395 (on-line version)
url: http://www.ijpam.eu
Special Issue
ijpam.eu

Improvising the Sales of Garments by Forecasting Market

Trends using Data Mining Techniques
S.Vinod Kumar1and S.Poonkuzhali2
1
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering,
Rajalakshmi Engineering College,
2
Professor & Head, Department of Information Technology, Rajalakshmi Engineering College

Abstract: The Textile industry plays a major role in International trade which improves our
country’s economy by 30 % due to its contribution in employment generation and earnings in
foreign exchange. India ranks world’s second in the production of textiles and garments
which leveraged the rapid economic growth. Sales forecasting is very crucial to improve the
demand and supply chain process in this garment industry. The large scale of data involved in
very dynamic e-commerce or offline business is not available at one click from available
software. Extracting relevant data from various business units quickly and modeling them
using visual analytics to make effective decisions using data mining techniques which
maneuver the textile industry to stay competent with world leaders. The proposed work
provides analytical inferences from e-commerce data for garment industry and proposes a set
of business drivers by predicting trends in e-commerce through trend analysis. These
analytics helps garment industry to improve the turn over, stay competitive against global
recession, fluctuating raw material cost and balance supply chain management.

Keywords: data mining, garment Industry, prediction, sales, trend analysis

I INTRODUCTION

At present Indian Textile Industry economy is growing at an enormous rate by taking competitions
and innovation seriously though there is a crisis in global economy. There is a significant contribution to
the global market by the Unique Multifarious Indian Ethnic Wears, apparels and accessories. India has
traditional design patterns and emerging fashion trends also on par with the fashion etiquettes of the
world. This along with the liberalization trends followed by Indian government has given rise to a huge
market space for export, innovation in design and fashion trends, retail and wholesale trade in garments
industry. Garments Industry has become a billion dollar context now. This business is now looked upon
more seriously and more professionally with multi-national companies expanding sales and production
territories. More sustained growth in the industry can be achieved by application of technology for
classification, clustering and prediction of sales, marketing, production of clothing apparels by means of
state of art machine learning algorithms. This can help us to manipulate the global market and synthesize
opportunities for success.

The huge data coming out of the manufacturing units, sales and marketing hubs, point of sale units
spread across various locations in the world needs to be organized and analyzed to throw light on the
trends of business in and around the company. The growing e-commerce trends have made scope for data
analytics very wide. With sub-second response to online transactions, data also is available for analysis
very widely. Recommendation and Customer Preferences based on correlation, classification and
prediction can be used to identify the trends that are famous for the day, week, month or year, even for
decades if the data is present at disposal.

The data mining algorithms for regression analysis, predictive classification, time series analysis,
forecasting, recommendation, customer preference or sentiment analysis, etc., have made possible
analytics a inseparable part of the garments industry.

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International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics Special Issue

The proposed work is focused on sales forecasting using trend analysis of garments industries
based on the e-commerce data collected from Coimbatore region which is called Manchester of Tamil
Nadu region in India due to its cotton production and the density of textile industries present in the
region. Time series analysis is performed on the data and forecasting on the trend of the sales is derived
from the data.The paper is divided as Introduction in first chapter, related works in the second chapter,
Methods and Materials for performing trend analysis using Time series based forecasting in textile
industry and Results and Discussion in the final chapter.

II. Review of Literature

Data Mining has helped derive deep insights into the trade if not available by manual analysis in the areas
of customer buying pattern analysis, customer relationship management based decision making,
managing the operations of wide spread units efficiently, make projections for future trading. Many
works have been considered in the proposed work for ground work. The literature survey is briefed in
the section below.
S.K.Tyagi and B.K Sharma[1] presented the role of quality control and usage of data mining tools and
techniques in Textile Industry. They gave the Computerization through Context-Analysis diagram of the
quality control Laboratory in Textile Industry.Xia Li et al [2] applied DEA method to analyze the
technological innovation of China’s top ten textile and apparel provinces in goods exported, and propose
the countermeasures to improve the efficiency of input and output in technological innovation.
PromodRaichurkar and RamachandranManickam[3] provided a detailed survey about Problems and
challenges for rapid growth, Optical fiber application in textiles, Marketing Initiatives, Scheme for
Integrated Textile Parks, Textile Education and Skill Development, and also reflects that wholehearted
joint efforts from manufacturers, buyers, suppliers, government, and other stockholders are highly
expected to accomplish the development of potential and sustainable textile industries growth in India.

Raj Kumar Somani and ReenaDadhich[4] gave new technologies to improve their MIS system by cloud
computing and mobile computing using various factors for single case company’s implementation project.
NahidaParvin et al,[5] presented a comparative analysis from accuracy to explore the knowledge by
classification techniques to make automated decision for reducing the rate of casualty of industrial
misshapes.They used Textile and Garment accident dataset. Vittorio Murino et al[6] addressed the defects
in textile manufacturing by new classification scheme with various extracted features using support
vector machines and made an accurate analysis on two different dataset.

SébastienThomassey[7] proposed a review of the different constraints related to sales forecasting in the
fashion industry to design a sale forecasting system.The different constraints taken to design the
forecasting system is Horizon, Life Cycle, Aggregation,Seasonality,Exogenous VariablesM.MartinJeyasingh
et al [8] attempted to predict clothing insulation factors by Linear regression to achieve the goal of
understanding the computational character of learning.

M.K. Gandhi et al,[9] achieved operational excellence and got the best on Return on Investment.They
proposed an add-on modules in ERP to fulfil the needs of the organization by eliminating the Risk factor.
M.K Gandhi andK.Sarukesi addressed the issues for of ERP Applications and identifies the solutions for
implementation in Apparel Industry[11]. Avonigharde[13] conducted a study on forecasting of clothing
sales using regression and time series model. EngyShafik [14] presented a Time series Forecasting Model
for US Winter Season Apparels based on Seasonality, Economic Condition, Fashion Trends and
Consumer Behavior.

Based on the background work the proposed work is focused on data mining using statistical modeling of
data in time series and forecasting based on the data.

III. Methods and Material

The basic process flow for the analysis process carried out through the proposed work is detailed in this section.

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This section is divided into Process flow Model and the Time Series Analysis algorithm used for analysis is
briefed in the subsequent section.

A. Process Flow Model

The data is acquired from various units of sales considered herein. The data from these units is organized,
pre-processed by means of smoothing and normalization. Smoothing reduces the variation present in the
data collected from various units. Normalization helps to retain the attributes obtained from feature
relevance fall within a specified range. The time series based forecasting and trend analysis is performed
using RStudio and R tools. Based on the predicted trends the report is generated from the tool under the
context. The fig 1 illustrates the flow pictorially.

E-commerce Data Preprocessing

Data Analytics
Dataset of Smoothing
using R tool
Garment Industry Normalization

Prediction of
Report Generation
Trends

Figure 1: Process Flow for Data Analysis

B. Dataset Description
The data acquired from various units of sales for the two companies ABC and XYZ is pre-
processed, feature selection is performed and the following attributes are chosen for forecasting
purpose. The attributes are Month. Number of Pieces sold &Amount sold for both
companies,Grand Total pieces sold, Grand Total Amountsold.The data is accumulated for three
years and then assembled for analysis.

C. Time Series Analysis

The time series analysis helps in identifying the forces and structure that affect the data and it
helps in order to fit the data to predict the data for future analysis. Time series analysis applied
herein is Holt-Winters exponential smoothing technique.

D. Holt – Winters Analysis

Holt Winters performs smoothing of even widely varying data to retain a particular range of the
variables projected in the analysis and then goes for forecasting, which is the most sensible way for
prediction.

Holt Winters Exponential Smoothing: Algorithm

1. The data is ordered chronologically to prepare a time series which is the base for the Holt- Winters
[12]
Analysis perceived in two dimensional order.
2. Smoothing is performed and the generated series is names St
whereSt=yt + (1 - )St-1 , S1 = y1 and theis the smoother used in the function.
The exponential smoothing formulae applied to a series with a trend and constant seasonal component
using the Holt-Winters additive technique are:
a t   (Yt  s t  p )  (1   )(a t 1  b t 1 )
b t   (a t  a t 1 )  (1   )b t 1
s t   (Yt  a t )  (1   )s t  p
where:

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International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics Special Issue

,  and  are the smoothing parameters

at is the smoothed level at time t
bt is the change in the trend at time t
st is the seasonal smooth at time t
p is the number of seasons per year
3. The Holt-Winters algorithm requires starting (or initialising) values. Most commonly:
1
ap  (Y1  Y2    Y p )
p
1 Y p 1  Y1 Y p  2  Y2 Yp p  Yp 
bp     
p p p p 
s1  Y1  a p , s 2  Y2  a p , , s p  Y p  a p
4. The Holt-Winters forecasts are then calculated using the latest estimates from the appropriate
exponential smooths that have been applied to the series.
So we have our forecast for time period T   :
ŷT   a T   b T  s T
where: a T is the smoothed estimate of the level at time T
b T is the smoothed estimate of the change in the trend value at T
s T is the smoothed estimate of the appropriate seasonal component at T

IV. Results and Discussions

For experimental analysis and study, an input dataset is collected from a garment industry in
Coimbatore, India for three years. For this analysis only two major vendors of that garments
company are considered and for confidentiality purpose, the companies names are not disclosed in
this paper and they are mentioned as company XYZ and ABC for referral throughout the paper. The
following are the components of analysis in this work.

A. Trend analysis of sales (in Rupees) for companies XYZ and ABC on monthly basis
B. Time series based forecasting of sales for companies XYZ and ABC for years in future

A. Trend analysis of sales (in Rupees) for companies XYZ and ABC on monthly basis
The sales is analyzed in terms of comparison over days, months and years. The trend analysis work based on
the dataset considered, led to the following inferences as summarized in fig 2, fig 3, fig 4 and fig 5.

250

200

150
ABC-13

100 ABC-14
ABC-15
50

0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Figure 2: Trend of number of pieces sold by Company ABC in last three years ( in months )

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International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics Special Issue

800
700
600
500
XYZ-13
400
XYZ-14
300
XYZ-15
200
100
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Figure 3: Trend of number of pieces sold by Company XYZ in last three years ( in months )

120000

100000

80000
ABC-13
60000
ABC-14
40000
ABC-15
20000

0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Figure 4: Trend of amount equivalent to sales made by Company ABC in last three years ( in months )

400000

350000

300000

250000
XYZ-13
200000
XYZ-14
150000
XYZ-15
100000

50000

0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Figure 5: Trend of amount equivalent to sales made by Company XYZ in last three years ( in months )

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 Company XYZ is the most potential client.

 Company ABC has shown seasonal trends in sales. It was highly hit after the seasons. In normal times
the sales has dropped considerably.
 Company XYZ has not been prone to seasonal sales. During festive seasons they seem to give good
deals to customers earlier to ABC and sales pick up earl during the festivities. The customers are not
only regional for XYZ it seems. There are others also using XYZ , this could be a potential reason why
seasonal festivities are not only the factors contributing to sales.
 Sales has been good on last weeks of the month except for festive season sales during the mid weeks or
vacation time sales.
 Sales has improved for the Company compared to the last year , but pattern of sales has not been same.
 Online users have increased maybe because of usage of Mobile Apps along with computers and
laptops.
 Weekend of last weeks of the month normally show good sales. In case of festivities or any other
reasons if sales has been good in mid weeks then the last weeks sales have not been to the mark.
 The vacation time weekdays sales are improving during March ,April and May.
 The sales has been good for XYZ most of the days in the month. There have been very few no sales
days compared to ABC.
 Earlier ABC seems to have not been getting sales on Sundays. This trend has changed. Sales of
weekends have improved.
B. Time series based forecasting of sales for companies XYZ and ABC for years in future
Based on the data, time series analysis and prediction is made and the prediction forecast for sales of both
companies ABC and XYZ are presented in fig 6 and fig 7 till 2050 A.D.

Fig 6: Forecast for Company ABC

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Fig 6: Forecast for Company XYZ

The above figures show that the sales of the company XYZ is likely to boom around 2025-28 and 2031-33 and it
is likely to increase through till 2050 with hikes in the afore mentioned years.

Conclusion
A Time series analysis and trend analysis of sales of vendors XYZ and ABC who are part of a
Garments Company is performed in the proposed work. The Business forecasting of sales till 2050
A.D is achieved from the existing sales data based on which the customer buying pattern and
Customer Relation based reasoning are achieved using mathematical models on the data. Based on
this work, the training and testing of the data with classical data mining algorithms can help to present
short-term or long-term forecasting and evaluation can be done on various parameters.

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