Data Mining Algorithm for Demand Forecast Analysis on Flash Sales Platform

With the development of the digital economy, the emerging marketing strategy of the e-commerce flash sales has been changing the traditional purchasing habits of customers. This imposes new decision-making challenges for companies involved in flash sales. It is important for companies to build the accurate product demand forecast analysis focusing on the characteristics of the flash sales and customer behaviors. In this paper, VIPS (Weipinhui, a Chinese e-commerce platform) is taken as a case study with the key focus on how sentiment factors in customer reviews affect product demand in flash sale platforms. The paper adopts two sentiment analysis methods based on emotional dictionaries. The method with a higher evaluation index is adopted to integrate the emotional factors into the autoregressive model for product demand and assessment. The experiments prove that the autoregressive model for integrating the sentiment factors demonstrates better forecasting performances than the models without sentiment factors. The experiments further confirm that when product demand for the previous two weeks and customer review sentiment factors in the previous week are taken into consideration, demand forecast effects are most accurate.