Amazon Forecast adds holiday calendars for 66 countries, to improve forecast accuracy

Amazon Forecast uses machine learning to generate accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience for inventory planning, workforce planning, energy demand forecasting and cloud infrastructure usage forecasting. This technology has been perfected from over 20 years of forecasting development at Amazon.com.

Amazon Forecast now provides native support for public holiday calendars for more countries bringing the total number of countries supported to 66. The full list of countries are mentioned here. Holidays such as Memorial Day in the US or Australia Day in Australia can have a significant impact on your product demand, workforce planning or infrastructure demand forecasts. For example, for the Halloween holiday in the US, demand for certain products such as candy and chocolates may increase. To prevent stock-outs, retailers would like to ensure that leading up to the holiday, they have high availability of such products on their shelves across different store locations. You can add such holidays to your historical demand data to generate more accurate forecasts. Until today the service supported only 30 countries. With this change, customers can now easily add public holidays of many countries including New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Peru, and Chile.

You can directly add public holidays from either of these 66 countries to your forecasting model with a single click in the AWS console or by passing a two letter country code e.g. “PE” (for Peru) using the ‘SupplementaryFeatures’ object in the Create Predictor API. You can learn more and find the full list of countries along with the two letter country code here.

To add custom events or non-public holidays for a particular country or region, you can continue to add those events by using the Related Time Series data source in Amazon Forecast.