# Neural Network for Forecasting Time series

I have a dataset of monthly sales for the past 6 years. Significant attributes in the data set are:

Region,  Nameplate,  Segment  MonthofSale and TotalSales.


I want to experiment with using neural networks for forecasting sales in R for the next 3 months. Using the Last 2 years as Validation data and the previous 4 years as Training.

If I were to do that, do I consider Region, Nameplate, Segment and MonthofSale as Inputs?

And do a 4 -3-1 network? Or did I get the whole concepts of inputs wrong?

Any pointers on this will greatly be appreciated. Thanks & Regards, B

• You might want to check out Kaggle.com's recent Wikipedia Web Traffic Time Series Forecasting competition, as the contest has ended and many top competitors have posted their solutions. The second place solution used a feedforward neural net with inputs like the ones you described, as well as day of the week, etc.. The 1st place solution used a sequence-to-sequence net. – Ben Ogorek Dec 11 '17 at 5:33