The requirement is a classic time-series forecasting problem. The retailer has historical observations indexed by time—weekly sales—and needs to predict numerical demand or inventory requirements over a future 12-week forecast horizon. AWS time-series forecasting capabilities are specifically designed for this type of workload.
AWS documentation for SageMaker AI time-series forecasting states that forecasting models predict “forecast horizon points in the future” based on historical time-series information. AWS also explains that SageMaker AutoML time-series models generate probabilistic forecasts by producing forecasts at configurable quantiles.
Probabilistic forecasting is particularly valuable for inventory planning. Instead of returning only a single demand estimate, the model can produce quantiles such as P10, P50, and P90. These estimates represent different demand scenarios and help the retailer make replenishment decisions according to acceptable stockout risk, storage cost, and service-level targets.
For example, P50 can represent a central estimate of future demand, while a higher quantile such as P90 can support a more conservative stocking policy where avoiding stockouts is especially important.
Option B is a deterministic inventory-management heuristic. Moving averages and fixed safety factors may be useful operational rules, but they do not fulfill the requirement to use an ML model for future prediction.
Option C performs segmentation rather than forecasting actual stock or demand quantities.
Option D removes anomalous data and then relies on manual replenishment rules. Anomaly treatment can be part of data preparation, but it does not itself produce the requested 12-week ML forecast.
AWS forecasting models are specifically designed to learn trends, seasonality, recurrent patterns, and relationships from historical time-series data and generate future predictions.
Therefore, the correct solution is A. Generate probabilistic time-series forecasts of weekly product demand by using historical sales records.
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