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We're using randomForest and R to do some forecasting for labor schedules. Specifically, we are using randomForest to do:
In some cases, this works quite well. In other cases, it's not working well at all. For example, for one customer who is always closed on Sundays, the software is predicting staff every Sunday. We've attempted to expand the algorithm to identify staffing needs on say, Sunday only, but find that this creates some other problems in our forecasting.
We don't have a strong background in O/R or machine learning ... |
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You might want to investigate multi-task prediction and consider adding inputs (or outputs) for whether the customer is open the next day. I recommend Caruana's Multitask Learning paper as a good entry point for thinking about multitask modeling. The advantage of a multitask model is that it can learn the structural constraints between the different predicted outputs, which can be helpful for avoiding logical violations (e.g., the customer is not open Sunday) and improving prediction accuracy. |
You might want to cross-post this on http://www.or-exchange.com/ to see if anyone in OR might have any ideas.