A logistics company needs a forecast model to predict next month's inventory requirements for a...

The MAPE of the predictor could be improved by making the following changes to the CreatePredictor API call:

Set PerformAutoML to true. This will allow Amazon Forecast to automatically evaluate different algorithms and choose the one that minimizes the objective function, which is the mean of the weighted losses over the forecast types. By default, these are the p10, p50, and p90 quantile losses1. This option can help find a better algorithm than DeepAR+ for the given data.

Set PerformHPO to true. This will enable hyperparameter optimization (HPO), which is the process of finding the optimal values for the algorithm-specific parameters that affect the quality of the forecasts. HPO can improve the accuracy of the predictor by tuning the hyperparameters based on the training data2.

The other options are not likely to improve the MAPE of the predictor. Setting ForecastHorizon to 4 will reduce the number of time steps that the model predicts, which may not match the business requirement of predicting next month’s inventory. Setting ForecastFrequency to W for weekly will change the granularity of the forecasts, which may not be appropriate for the monthly data. Setting FeaturizationMethodName to filling will not have any effect, since there is no missing data in the dataset.

CreatePredictor - Amazon Forecast

HPOConfig - Amazon Forecast