Spare Parts Demand Forecasting Method Based on Intermittent Feature Adaptation

The demand for complex equipment aftermarket parts is mostly sporadic, showing typical intermittent characteristics as a whole, resulting in the evolution law of a single demand series having insufficient information, which restricts the prediction effect of existing methods. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a prediction method of intermittent feature adaptation from the perspective of transfer learning. Firstly, to extract the intermittent features of the demand series, an intermittent time series domain partitioning algorithm is proposed by mining the demand occurrence time and demand interval information in the series, then constructing the metrics, and using a hierarchical clustering algorithm to divide all the series into different sub-source domains. Secondly, the intermittent and temporal characteristics of the sequence are combined to construct a weight vector, and the learning of common information between domains is accomplished by weighting the distance of the output features of each cycle between domains. Finally, experiments are conducted on the actual after-sales datasets of two complex equipment manufacturing enterprises. Compared with various prediction methods, the method in this paper can effectively predict future demand trends, and the prediction’s stability and accuracy are significantly improved.