Data Study Group Final Report: ASDA

Abstract

Data Study Groups are week-long events at The Alan Turing Institute bringing together some of the country's top talent from data science, artificial intelligence, and wider fields, to analyse real-world data science challenges. Exploring and quantifying the effect of weather on sales ASDA, one of the biggest supermarket chains in the UK, is interested in how weather affects sales of certain product groups. Understanding the weather-sales relationship would allow ASDA to manage the supply-chain system and distribution in a timely and efficient manner, particularly reducing the risk of food waste for fresh products such as meat while having products in stock as needed. The analysis of the weather-sales relationship builds on a huge dataset which includes daily sales data for 151 product groups in over 600 stores across the UK over 3 years, and daily weather conditions at each store, including mean daily humidity, wind speed, rainfall, snowfall and minimum and maximum daily temperature. The Alan Turing Institute is the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, with headquarters at the British Library. Data Study Groups are intensive five day collaborative hackathons hosted at the The Alan Turing Institute, which bring together organisations from industry, government, and the third sector, with multi-disciplinary researchers from academia. ASDA, the Data Study Group Challenge Owner, provided the real-world challenge and the data to be tackled by a group of researchers led by two Principal Investigators and a Facilitator. This report is the culmination of that process and is the result of their joint co-authorship.