Product backorder prediction using deep neural network on imbalanced data

Taking backorders on products is a common scenario in inventory and supply chain management systems. The ability to predict the likelihood of backorders can surely minimise a company's losses. Because the number of backorders is much lower than the number of orders that ship on time, applying a predictive model for this domain is a challenging task. This paper proposes a model that uses a deep neural network to predict backorders; it handles the data imbalance between backorders and filled orders with efficient techniques. To make the dataset balanced, we employ different techniques that include minority class weight boosting, randomised oversampling, SMOTE oversampling, and a combination of oversampling and undersampling. The balanced training data are used in our proposed, fully…