In today’s evolving global world, the pharmaceutical sector faces an emerging challenge, which is the rapid surge of the global population and the consequent growth in drug production demands. Recognizing this, our study explores the urgent need to strengthen pharmaceutical production capacities, ensuring drugs are allocated and stored strategically to meet diverse regional and demographic needs. Summarizing our key findings, our research focuses on the promising area of drug demand forecasting using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to enhance predictions in the pharmaceutical field. Supplied with a rich dataset from Kaggle spanning 600,000 sales records from a singular pharmacy, our study embarks on a thorough exploration of univariate time series analysis. Here, we pair conventional analytical tools such as ARIMA with advanced methodologies like LSTM neural networks, all with a singular vision: refining the precision of our sales. Venturing deeper, our data underwent categorisation and were segmented into eight clusters premised on the ATC Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Classification System framework. This segmentation unravels the evident influence of seasonality on drug sales. The analysis not only highlights the effectiveness of machine learning models but also illuminates the remarkable success of XGBoost. This algorithm outperformed traditional models, achieving the lowest MAPE values: 17.89% for M01AB (anti-inflammatory and antirheumatic products, non-steroids, acetic acid derivatives, and related substances), 16.92% for M01AE (anti-inflammatory and antirheumatic products, non-steroids, and propionic acid derivatives), 17.98% for N02BA (analgesics, antipyretics, and anilides), and 16.05% for N02BE (analgesics, antipyretics, pyrazolones, and anilides). XGBoost further demonstrated exceptional precision with the lowest MSE scores: 28.8 for M01AB, 1518.56 for N02BE, and 350.84 for N05C (hypnotics and sedatives). Additionally, the Seasonal Naïve model recorded an MSE of 49.19 for M01AE, while the Single Exponential Smoothing model showed an MSE of 7.19 for N05B. These findings underscore the strengths derived from employing a diverse range of approaches within the forecasting series. In summary, our research accentuates the significance of leveraging machine learning techniques to derive valuable insights for pharmaceutical companies. By applying the power of these methods, companies can optimize their production, storage, distribution, and marketing practices.

Accurate retail demand forecasting is integral to the operational efficiency of any retail business. As demand is described over time, the prediction of demand is a time-series forecasting problem which may be addressed in a univariate manner, via statistical methods and simplistic machine learning approaches, or in a multivariate fashion using generic deep learning forecasters that are well-established in other fields. This study analyzes, optimizes, trains and tests such forecasters, namely the Temporal Fusion Transformer and the Temporal Convolutional Network, alongside the recently proposed Time-Series Mixer, to accurately forecast retail demand given a dataset of historical sales in 45 stores with their accompanied features. Moreover, the present work proposes a novel extension of the Time-Series Mixer architecture, the LSTMixer, which utilizes an additional Long Short-Term Memory block to achieve better forecasts. The results indicate that the proposed LSTMixer model is the better predictor, whilst all the other aforementioned models outperform the common statistical and machine learning methods. An ablation test is also performed to ensure that the extension within the LSTMixer design is responsible for the improved results. The findings promote the use of deep learning models for retail demand forecasting problems and establish LSTMixer as a viable and efficient option.

This work conducts a systematic literature review about the domain of personalized advertisement, and more specifically, about the techniques that are used for this purpose. State-of-the-art publications and techniques are presented in detail, and the relationship of this domain with other related domains such as artificial intelligence (AI), semantic web, etc., is investigated. Important issues such as (a) business data utilization in personalized advertisement models, (b) the cold start problem in the domain, (c) advertisement visualization issues, (d) psychological factors in the personalization models, (e) the lack of rich datasets, and (f) user privacy are highlighted and are pinpointed to help and inspire researchers for future work. Finally, a design framework for personalized advertisement systems has been designed based on these findings.

A domain that has gained popularity in the past few years is personalized advertisement. Researchers and developers collect user contextual attributes (e.g., location, time, history, etc.) and apply state-of-the-art algorithms to present relevant ads. A problem occurs when the user has limited or no data available and, therefore, the algorithms cannot work well. This situation is widely referred in the literature as the ‘cold-start’ case. The aim of this manuscript is to explore this problem and present a prediction approach for personalized mobile advertising systems that addresses the cold-start, and especially the frozen user case, when a user has no data at all. The approach consists of three steps: (a) identify existing datasets and use specific attributes that could be gathered from a frozen user, (b) train and test machine learning models in the existing datasets and predict click-through rate, and (c) the development phase and the usage in a system.