Book Image

The Art of Data-Driven Business

By : Alan Bernardo Palacio
Book Image

The Art of Data-Driven Business

By: Alan Bernardo Palacio

Overview of this book

One of the most valuable contributions of data science is toward helping businesses make the right decisions. Understanding this complicated confluence of two disparate worlds, as well as a fiercely competitive market, calls for all the guidance you can get. The Art of Data-Driven Business is your invaluable guide to gaining a business-driven perspective, as well as leveraging the power of machine learning (ML) to guide decision-making in your business. This book provides a common ground of discussion for several profiles within a company. You’ll begin by looking at how to use Python and its many libraries for machine learning. Experienced data scientists may want to skip this short introduction, but you’ll soon get to the meat of the book and explore the many and varied ways ML with Python can be applied to the domain of business decisions through real-world business problems that you can tackle by yourself. As you advance, you’ll gain practical insights into the value that ML can provide to your business, as well as the technical ability to apply a wide variety of tried-and-tested ML methods. By the end of this Python book, you’ll have learned the value of basing your business decisions on data-driven methodologies and have developed the Python skills needed to apply what you’ve learned in the real world.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Data Analytics and Forecasting with Python
4
Part 2: Market and Customer Insights
9
Part 3: Operation and Pricing Optimization

Using Historical Markdown Data to Predict Sales

Many retailers have no choice but to follow the industry trend of increased use of discounts and special marketing to maintain a competitive edge in today’s oversaturated market. This is because most of the new customers are more price-sensitive and will check prices across websites to discover the bests offers for specific products.

Discounting, however, has its drawbacks. While promotions can speed up sales, businesses also run the danger of further profit loss when offering discounts without conducting adequate research. One challenge of modeling retail data is the need to make decisions based on limited history. If Christmas comes but once a year, so does the chance to see how strategic decisions impacted the bottom line.

In this chapter, we delve deeper into the most recent markdown and discount marketing tactics used by industry leaders and show you how to implement them while maintaining profit margins. We will use...