BigMart Outlet Sales Prediction

Precious Kolawole
8 min readAug 9, 2020

The data scientists at BigMart have collected 2013 sales data for 1559 products across 10 stores in different cities. Also, certain attributes of each product and store have been defined. The aim is to build a predictive model and predict the sales of each product at a particular outlet.

Using this model, BigMart will try to understand the properties of products and outlets which play a key role in increasing sales.

This article will acquaint you with everything you need to know in order to engage in hackathons/ competitions. It will take you through;

  • Data Loading
  • Data preprocessing
  • Feature engineering
  • Building a model
  • Making a submission

I sense you are in a haste to learn!

Data Source

Datahack is one of the biggest data hackathon platforms for data scientists. Here is a link to join the competition. On the Analytics Vidhya platform, you can download your test file, train file, sample submissions and save them in a folder. Rename the test file as test.csv, train file as train.csv, sample submissions file as sample_submission.csv.

Data Loading

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Precious Kolawole

Health Technology Enthusiast || Engineering @ Shopify || Data scientist and Machine Learning Engineer