A key metric for improving business cafeteria operations, inventory control, and customer satisfaction is accurate sales forecasting. k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and other standard machine learning algorithms usually fail to identify temporal patterns in sales data, which leads to predictions that are not accurate. We provide a better forecasting technique that overcomes this limitation by utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, a specific kind of recurrent neural network that can recognize long-term dependencies in sequential data. The performances of LSTM and k-NN were compared and evaluated using a Kaggle corporate cafeteria sales dataset. Based on experimental results, the LSTM model outperformed k-NN with a mean prediction accuracy of 87.57% compared to 83.99%. The significance of the improvement (p = 0.038) was validated by statistical testing with an independent samples t-test.
@article{m.2025,
author = {Ruban Gladwin M. and Jenifer P.},
title = {{Enhanced Sales Forecasting in Corporate Cafeterias: An LSTM Approach}},
journal = {Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Capsule Networks},
volume = {7},
number = {3},
pages = {244-257},
year = {2025},
publisher = {Inventive Research Organization},
doi = {10.36548/jaicn.2025.3.002},
url = {https://doi.org/10.36548/jaicn.2025.3.002}
}
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